This year we mark eighty years to the end of World War II, which birthed an international order that has profoundly shaped our world. Today, many argue that we are seeing the dissolution of the post-WWII world order and a transition into something else entirely. This panel asks: How should we understand the post-WWII world order eighty years later? How and why is it now changing? And where do we think this is all going?
KRISTIN CAULFIELD: I now turn the event over to Professor Erez Manela, acting director of the Weatherhead Center.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much, Kristin. As Kristin just said, my name is Erez Manela. I'm a history professor at Harvard, and the acting director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. This year, a topic of discussion at the Weatherhead forum today, which is our platform at the Weatherhead Center to address pressing topics of the day, our topic of discussion is one that we think is both pressing and timely. The title that we chose is From Victory to Uncertainty: The Postwar Order After 80 Years. And of course, this is designed to mark this year, the 80th anniversary, of the end of the Second World War in 1945.
I say that this is a timely topic, because this is the 80th anniversary, but also-- to the end of World War II, but also because that war gave birth to a new international order that has profoundly shaped our world ever since, and that, today, many argue we are seeing being dissolved and transitioning into something else entirely.
So we gathered this panel, these three distinguished speakers, to ask them, how should we understand the post World War II order 80 years later, how and why is it now changing, and where do we think this is all going?
So in terms of format, we've asked each of our speakers to make brief opening remarks along these lines. Then, I will lead a discussion with the speakers. And finally, we'll take audience questions using the Zoom Q&A function. So if you have any questions, you can put them-- type them into that-- the Q&A function in the Zoom, and I will-- I can't promise to get to all of them, but I will try to get to as many as I can.
Now, without further ado, let me introduce our three speakers, who really are-- I mean, if one wanted to put together a dream team to speak to this topic we have today, these would be the three top recruits to that team. The first speaker is Margaret MacMillan. She is emeritus professor of history at the University of Toronto, and an emeritus professor of international history at Oxford University. She was provost of Trinity College, Toronto from 2002 to 2007, and warden of St. Anthony's college at Oxford from 2007 to 2017.
She's a trustee of the Imperial War Museum, and sits on a number of nonprofit advisory boards. Her books have been translated into 26 languages, and they include Paris 1919, Nixon and Mao, and The War That Ended Peace. Her latest book, which is titled War: How Conflict Shaped Us, which came out in 2020, was named one of the New York Times 10 best books of that year.
Our second speaker will be Professor Rana Mitter, who is ST Lee Chair of US-Asia relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the author of several books, including Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, which came out in 2013, and was named a book of the year in the Financial Times and The Economist. And his latest book is China's Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism, which came out in 2020.
And finally, our third speaker is Stephen Wertheim. He is a historian of US Foreign Relations and an analyst of current problems in American strategy and diplomacy. He is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School. He is the author of Tomorrow the World: the Birth of US Global Supremacy, which came out in 2020, and was a Foreign Affairs book of the year.
So we'll go by the order of introductions. Margaret first, then Rana, then Stephen. And then, we'll launch our discussion. Margaret, please.
MARGARET MACMILLAN: Thanks. Thank you so much, Erez, and it's a great pleasure to be here and to be with these two terrific fellow panelists, and I'm looking forward to our discussion. I want to talk-- because I'm an historian, I want to go back. And so I want to talk about the ways in which international orders emerge. And often they emerge out of great change.
Prince Metternich, the great Austrian diplomat and chancellor at the beginning of the 19th century said, if you tell me when a man was born and the first 20 years of his life, what he lived through, then I will understand him. I'm not quoting him accurately. He was much more elegant than that.
But it is true, I think, that people approach the world with the knowledge of what the world has been like as they were growing up in it. And we often see new orders emerging after great catastrophes. It's true of the Thirty Years' War in the 17th century, which produced the Westphalian system. The French Revolution and Napoleonic wars produced the Concert of Europe, a period of stability and order in Europe. And the First and Second World Wars were going to produce new calls for new international systems, new international organizations, the League of Nations in the first World War, and the United Nations, as well as other organizations after the Second World War.
Often, before a great catastrophe comes to an end and people begin to pick up the pieces, I think you get thinkers and others speculating about what could be possible. How do we avoid having something like this happen again? And just to give you one example, and there are many, even before the Napoleonic wars started, when the wars of the French Revolution were just getting going, the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote a pamphlet about a League for Perpetual Peace.
At the beginning of it, he made the only joke I think he's ever been known to make, but it's not a very good joke, so I won't tell you. But he talked about the need to change cultures, to get away from the aristocratic culture, which valorized war, which thought war was wonderful, and to have a much more people's culture, a war where the peoples took control over their own rulers, where nations would use coercive powers to stop other nations from fighting. And he hoped that, one day, war would be removed from humanity altogether.
After the Napoleonic wars in the 19th century, changes-- you began to get talks, again, about how to deal with the international order. The 19th century was a period of long peace for Europe, of course, not for the rest of the world. But there were rapid changes and huge changes taking place, and this led to a great deal of speculation about how do we deal with this.
And not only were nationalisms sprouting and developing, this was an age of nationalisms, which led to tensions between nations. But what was also happening were, of course, enormous scientific, technological, and industrial advances, which brought increased prosperity, it linked the world more closely together, but it also brought a much greater capacity for destruction.
And as the 19th century wore on, and as the international order set up after the Napoleonic wars set up after 1815 began to fray, people increasingly worried about how they could develop some sorts of institutions that would prevent these dreadful powers that were in the hands of, often, highly nationalistic nations from being used.
Well, as we know, it didn't work, but what it did do was leave a body of law. There were new limits placed on weapons. The Hague and Geneva Conventions brought in all sorts of provisions, which formed, really, the basis of international law about war. They developed protocols for treating civilians during war, protocols for dealing with prisoners of war.
You also saw the internationalization of thinking about war, thinking about international order, thinking about concerns. And you saw a growth in global institutions of a response to the globalization of the world. I mean, the period before the first World War was the first great period, I think, of globalization in the world. And so you've got organizations necessarily forming to manage things like trade, slavery, the arms trade, health, the big pandemics that swept through much of Europe and Asia, and the new world in the 19th century brought new international measures.
And what we also saw in the 19th century, and it's still with us, is the growth of international organizations of citizens, transnational non-governmental organizations, of parliamentarians, lawyers, philanthropists, as well as international campaigns and crusades to end abuses. An enormous campaign over, for example, the dreadful abuses being committed by the Belgian King in the Congo.
And, I think, there was hope that war was something that was becoming impractical, too costly, and in the process of being managed and controlled, which is why, of course, why the first World War was such a dreadful shock to Europe, and indeed, to most of the world. It was a war that mainly affected Europe, but it had ramifications around the world, in China, in Africa, in the new world.
And it was something that, I think, caused a deep sense of shock that this powerful part of the world, Europe, this part of the world, which saw itself in the advance of civilization and development, could do something as dreadful as this. And so out of the First World War came a new vision, drawing on many of the changes in ideas that had been developed in the 19th century, articulated most prominently by Woodrow Wilson, the American president, involving mutual security, trying to remove the causes of war, trying to develop a Democratic public opinion-- international public opinion, which would pressure leaders to avoid using war as a tool.
And there was support for this idea, this vision, embodied in the League of Nations among his peers at the Paris Peace Conference, but also, in public opinion around the world. League of Nations organizations sprang up in the interwar years to try and support the new League of Nations. And then, of course, we know it didn't work. There was the shock-- even greater shock-- of the Second World War.
And I think very important to remember, in line with what Metternich said, that the leaders of the nations in the Second World War had come through the First World War. They had seen the First World War. Winston Churchill had been a cabinet minister and had fought briefly in the war. Roosevelt had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy and had visited the front. Stalin had not fought in the First World War, but had fought, certainly, in the Civil War.
And so all had experienced war. They knew what war could cost. They knew what it meant. And, I think, that affected the ways in which they began to think of what would happen at the end of the war. And one of the things that is striking, I think, is they were so aware of the costs of war. They were aware that the previous attempts to avoid war had not worked.
And the Second World War, of course, was even more costly, even more global in its impact than the first World War. I mean, we'll never know how many died. One estimate is 50 million. It's very, very difficult to calculate these things. Whole cities were leveled, ports, mines, railways, bridges, infrastructures were destroyed.
And what is striking, I think, is that even in the middle of the war, as they were dealing with all the demands of war, the leaders, particularly Churchill and Roosevelt, were thinking about what came after the war. They started thinking and planning a lot earlier than in the First World War. And so the British had a committee to look at setting up new international organizations, as did the United States.
And from very early on, particularly, I think, under pressure from President Roosevelt, the alliance, the Grand Alliance, that managed the Second World War talked about what would happen after the war. Roosevelt insisted when he and Churchill met off the Coast of Newfoundland in August 1941 that an Atlantic Charter would be drawn up to talk about removing the causes of war. And so I think this was very, very important.
The Soviet Union was more concerned about recognition as a power and about maintaining its consequences, but it was prepared to take place in such discussions because it thought there would be-- Stalin thought, in line with Marxist ideology, there'd be a long period of reconstruction that eventually the great capitalist powers, the United States and the British Empire, would fall out.
But in the meantime, he was prepared to see the Soviet Union taking part in international organizations. And so there were Soviet representatives at Dumbarton Oaks, at the San Francisco conferences, which established the format and the framework of the League of Nations, and there were Soviet representatives at Bretton-- there were Soviet representatives at Bretton Woods.
And so the Soviet Union, I think, was engaged in the postwar planning, even if it didn't entirely believe in it. It was widespread in the support from many quarters around the world. I mean, this was not just something that the big three did. There was support from Latin America, from India, from China, from Egypt, around the world for new institutions that would prevent a catastrophe like this ever happening again.
Well, as we know, the postwar order of post 1945 order never fully met those hopes. But on the other hand, the Cold War made that impossible. The Soviet Union was never completely excluded. It managed to develop relationships with the non-aligned nations and also with the Western powers. And over time, rather like a long and complicated relationship, the partners developed ways of avoiding confrontations. They developed ways of trying to reassure the other that they were not planning something dreadful.
What happened, of course, and it always happens, is that as time went by, both publics and those in charge forgot why they had wanted international organizations. Those who had actually experienced the Second World War, and this happened after the First World War, too, began to disappear from the scene.
And those of us who grew up in what seemed like a very stable world-- I grew up in Canada-- didn't understand, I think, just how important the international order was. The public's lost interest. It seemed an unnecessary expense to support international organizations. And states people, I think, no longer really felt that sense of urgency because they had not experienced war directly.
It also happened, and that also happened with the British before the first World War, and after the first World War, that the United States simply tired of being the world's policeman and began to withdraw or become less enthusiastic in its support for international organizations and agreements.
And so what we have now is a system that is fraying. There is increasingly open flouting both of international treaties and also of norms. And norms are often as important as the actual documents in treaties. President Vladimir Putin is only one of those who is simply ignoring what have been long established norms, the key one being that you do not take territory from another country by force. If you do, it won't be recognized. And this is something he simply no longer pays any attention to.
And what is so dangerous, I think, at the moment is the power of example. Others will be encouraged to do what he has done. And so we see the spread of discord. We see conflicts around the world seem-- some seemingly intractable. We see instability in certain regions spreading. And yet, we still have global challenges. We're living through a period of great uncertainty, as Paul Collier once said, a period of radical uncertainty.
And at the moment, I don't think that we have collectively been aware enough and frightened enough to do something about it. But I think we are reaching a point now where we're going to have to think seriously about how we reconstitute some sort of international order. Thanks.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you, Margaret. Rana.
RANA MITTER: Great. Thank you very much, indeed. And thank you, Margaret, for a wonderful introduction to an extremely urgent topic, in many senses, and showing how history can inform the very turbulent situation that the world is currently in.
I'm going to speak specifically about one country, the country that I spend most of my time doing research on, which is China. And I'd also like to address, as Margaret did, the way in which aspects of history can tell us something about the changing world order as it relates to China, but I'd like to do so in the context of one particular recent event.
Many people, particularly, I think, the kind of people who are Weatherhead Center fans and would log on to this call, will have noticed the big military parade held just a couple of weeks ago on 3rd of September, 2025, in Beijing in Tiananmen Square. And you'll be aware that the occasion for the parade was a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Japan in World War II.
Now, one of the things that was slightly, how can one put it, interesting but jarring, from my point of view, seeing it on TV was that 10 years previously, on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, I'd actually been in Beijing and had a chance to see, if not the parade, at least the surroundings for it a little bit closer up.
So I found myself thinking, what is different, as well as what is the same, in terms of the way in which that ceremony was held 10 years ago and this year? And what aspects of those changes tell us something about China's changing attitude in the wider world today? And I'll give you three, and use aspects of the parade and things that went on around it to try and describe them before finishing with a couple of thoughts about the direction of travel this may give us.
The first one is something that was visible in the parade, but one could also see elsewhere. So I'm sure that everyone will have seen this huge array of very carefully drilled soldiers in huge formations that produce this extraordinary effect of very, very strong military power.
And domestically in China, that's partly an indication of a nod towards the past to a time when 80, 100 years ago, China was a very weak state in the international order, and partly a signal that has come from its current leaders, the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, that they intend to maintain China as a militarily extremely strong state. It's now, of course, the second biggest military in the world after the United States.
But within that parade, if you look carefully, you might have seen one particular formation, which was Chinese soldiers wearing blue berets. In other words, indicating their membership of one area where China chooses to deploy its military power, which is in the United Nations peacekeeping capacity.
Now, China is not the single largest provider per capita of peacekeepers. It's a relatively small, although well-trained number. I think, although others on this call may be able to correct me during Q&A, I think Bangladesh, actually, may be one of the countries that overall has one of the largest contributions to PKO peacekeeping operations. But China has certainly taken a much more central role in the last 20, 30 years in this particular area.
And it's notable that this is being flagged up in a parade that, of course, is commemorative at the end of the Second World War. Why would this be? Well, one place that you can go and find out is a short distance from Tiananmen Square in the suburb of Wanping.
Wanping may or may not be familiar to you, but you might know it, if you're a history buff, in terms of one of or perhaps its single most famous architectural artifact, the Marco Polo Bridge. In other words, the bridge, which, at least in legend, was recorded by the Italian traveler Marco Polo back in medieval times when he traveled near Beijing. And more recently, relatively, in 1937, it was the site of the outbreak of fighting conflict between China and Japan, which broke into the Sino-Japanese War, which ultimately became part of World War II in Asia.
So, at least in terms of the outbreak of widespread fighting, the Marco Polo Bridge in the suburb of Beijing was the spark, the start point for that war. And so, perhaps appropriately, that is where you should go if you want to see China's biggest museum of what in China is called the War of Resistance against Japanese aggression. This is, of course, the Sino-Japanese war, as it's known more neutrally to many of us, or indeed, World War II in China.
And right in the basement of that museum-- and I was there just a few weeks ago-- it's fascinating to see, actually. There was a newly built gallery. It had, actually, been built at quite high speed for this anniversary, which stressed, amongst other things, not in this case, the military prowess of China at all, but actually, the founding role that China had as a member of the first formation of the United Nations.
And again, I'm aware that Professor Manela is one of the global experts in this particular subject. So we may well have some back and forth on this when we come to discussion and Q&A. But it's worth noting that this is one example of a much wider language, a discourse, that has been really growing in China over the last 15, 20 years, which is the argument that just as the United States was, in the words of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, present at the creation, present at the creation of the words of what we now think of as the increasingly frayed post 1945 world order, the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, all of these sorts of institutions.
So China is now keen to really flag up in a very, very prominent way that it, too, spent blood and treasure and had many, many millions who were killed during the war as a price to be paid for being a founder of this new global order.
Now, previously, by previously, I mean, maybe 30, 40, 50 years ago under Chairman Mao, this was not something China talked about. First of all, Taiwan had the China seat at the UN all the way till 1971, a sort of Cold War anomaly. And second, Mao's China was more keen on revolutionary overturning of global order rather than trying to reinterpret existing order according to Chinese needs.
Finally, of course, it's worth noting that the government that signed that UN Charter, which everyone from Xi Jinping talks about these days, was the former nationalist government under Chiang Kai-Shek, not, of course, the Communist government of today. But these historical complexities are usually smoothed over in the explanation.
So seeing that basement museum display would be a good place to understand how the UN is not only now central to the way in which China sees its role as a new owner of the existing global order, but also goes right back to the immediate 1945 late World War II postwar world to define its legitimacy in being part of that order. And clearly, although it's not stated as such, this is a challenge to the United States as the traditional lead actor in the UN.
That's number one. Number two, again, you could see traces of this at the parade, but the best way to indicate what I'm about to say was to look at who was on the main platform alongside Xi Jinping. And as the world saw it was, of course, Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, and now close partner. Not technically an ally. There is not a formal alliance. But certainly, a partner in, certainly, technology, in international relations, in diplomacy, and a whole variety of areas with Xi Jinping.
And World War II is now being used as another way in which a news story about the origins of today's global order, the global order that is to come in the 2020s and '30s, should be explored. For that reason, Russian and Soviet contributions to China's war victory in 1945 are now very apparent, again, in museums, in movies, and again, indicated in a slightly more discreet, but nonetheless visible way, in the parade.
So what were these contributions? Well, historically, I think we can point to two things, or at least two things. Number one is a story that actually deserves to be a bit better remembered than it is. Many people will have heard of the famous, and rightly famous, American Flying Tigers under general Claire Lee Chenault, who helped to defend the skies over the temporary wartime nationalist capital at Chongqing, in the years before Pearl Harbor. So they were volunteers, technically, because FDR did not want to pull America into the war until it had to be there.
But it's forgotten that in the first year or two of the war, 1938, '39, Soviet pilots were actually sent to defend the skies over Shanghai and other cities where the nationalist Chinese were fighting, but did not have significant Air Force cover of their own. There was a Chinese Air Force. Cut to the chase, it was not very effective. And often, actually, bombed its own people more than it did the enemy.
So that trained Soviet Air Force presence, even though it was unofficial, of course, so Stalin didn't want to get pulled formally into a war, was important, and we should give credit for that. Also, of course, way at the end of the war, August 1945, the land invasion of Manchuria by the Red Army is one of the events, along with, of course, the atomic bombings, that bring the war against Japan to a much more rapid halt than many people realized.
So those are historically attested elements of the Soviet presence that, I think, we can say are important in understanding the whole picture. But the Chinese version of this, which was on display at the parade and talked about in museums and elsewhere, leaves out at least one very inconvenient fact, which is that, essentially, between 1939 and 1945, the Soviet Union was neutral against Japan.
That's one of the reasons that, when you look at the famous picture by-- famous, anyway, of the Cairo Conference of 1943, where Chiang Kai-Shek and indeed, Soong Mei Ling, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, very important figure in her own right, sits beside FDR and Winston Churchill. You will look in vain for Joseph Stalin. As a neutral power against Japan, he could not be seen openly in front of the world sitting with Chiang Kai-Shek. He met the other two leaders, FDR and Churchill, at Tehran a few days afterwards.
But that Cairo photograph is an indication that, actually, the United States and the British Empire provided significant support, not on the ground troops, but financial and military supplies and support during those years. And the Soviets were not really involved with that. Now, fair enough, in one sense, they had a whole Eastern front to fight on. And of course, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union following the Nazi-Soviet pact.
And by the way, of course, the two years of Nazi-Soviet pact where the Germans and Soviets were working with each other also tend to be airbrushed out of the record in China as well. So just worth noting that. In other words, real historical events are being rewritten in service of a very present day interpretation, which is that China and Russia are allies and-- well, not allies, but they're partners now.
And if you'd gone back even a few years, just a couple of decades, of course, in the aftermath of the Sino-Sovient split during the Cold War, that is not a story that would have been stressed at all in accounts of World War II. So it's a recent interpretation with a presentist and future-oriented indication of the idea that China and Russia will be together. But it derives from a half forgotten wartime history, which is now being revived.
Let me, in my last minute or two, Erez, just give one other brief example which relates to a contemporary issue, and that's Taiwan. It's no secret, I suspect, to anyone on this call that China has, or the People's Republic of China, is making it increasingly clear and urgent that it regards what it calls the resolution, in other words, unification of Taiwan and the mainland to be a key task.
And World War II, again, is pulled into evidence as part of this wider message that Taiwan and the mainland are and have always had, a kind of common destiny. This involves pulling up, for instance, accounts, often of quite minimal rebellions on the island of Taiwan, against the Japanese colonizers. And remember, it was a colony of Japan from 1895 to 1945.
What isn't brought up, again, a historically more awkward reality, such as the fact that more than 200,000 Taiwanese did fight in World War II, but they fought on the Japanese side because, of course, they were part of the Imperial Japanese army, as were many Koreans, of course, as part of the way in which the Japanese empire worked.
These historical elements are, for obvious political reasons, very difficult to talk about, whether in the home countries or in the context of China. But they are important in understanding the difference between the complex and often very uncomfortable realities of World War II history in Asia, not just in China, and the way in which they are smoothed into often very politically convenient narratives about the politics of the present day, but nonetheless, subject to change.
Nonetheless, as my final word, I would say that if you look at the parade and what's going on around it, I would say that China stressing its growing role as a central power in the UN, as the US begins to withdraw a bit from the organization in some ways is one message. The continuation of the Russo-Chinese partnership, I would say, is certainly being signaled there.
And the third one is that the question of Taiwan, there's no clear answer to what it is that the mainland wants to do on that, but it's certainly being flagged up as an issue of continuing concern. And that may give some indications of what the memorialization of war in China today does in terms of shaping some of the international agendas of the present day and the years and decades to come. Erez, thank you.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much, Rana. Stephen, go ahead.
STEPHEN WERTHEIM: Wonderful. It is a treat to have this conversation, even though I've been given some predictably tough acts to follow. So I want to speak mostly about the United States, to which the premise of our panel applies well. The United States sure seems to be in the midst of a transition to a different kind of global role for itself. The destination remains uncertain and unpredictable, but it does seem likely to be less tethered to the institutions, patterns, and even ideas and ideologies established in the wake of the Second World War.
That said, I want to focus my remarks by posing the question of what we might miss in the case of the United States, in particular, when we take the postwar order as the touchstone from which to interpret the present and assess the stakes of the current moment.
Many of the changes underway seem, to me, to stem, first and foremost, from the post-Cold War international order, from the trajectories set by it, and the reactions to it. And much of the uncertainty today in Washington derives from, I think, the US decision after 1989 to pursue global political military primacy in a unipolar world absent great power rivals of the kind the United States and its allies confronted in World War II, and then, in the Cold War.
After all, if President Trump is the central protagonist in the American part of this drama, it's worth noting that he and his advisors often present themselves as revising mistakes of post-Cold War policy making, not as seeking to alter post 1945 arrangements. One widely understood Trump narrative is about post-Cold War globalization and the dislocations caused by trade and migration.
Another story is about grand strategic overreach from the project of liberal world ordering, the United States, in this view, aired by attempting nation building wars to liberalize Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, naively facilitated China's rise in the expectation that it, too, would liberalize and/or become a pro-American actor on the world stage.
For Pentagon officials, like Elbridge Colby, for example, World War II and the Cold War were fine things, and the trouble came when the United States mucked around in the Middle East and allowed China to rise to become a peer competitor with the United States in the Western Pacific and beyond.
Now, of course, one shouldn't take at face value the stories Trump and company tell about what they're doing. But I think there is good reason to take seriously a post-Cold war, rather than post-world war framing of the current upheaval in US foreign policy, even if one might not take the Trumpian version of that post-Cold war narrative.
So to stay with political economy, the post 1945 order was famously designed to achieve, as John Ruggie put it, embedded liberalism, that is, to privilege national employment and welfare above the burdens of international economic adjustment while still enjoying gains from trade. But over time, the economic order shifted toward neoliberalism long before Trump came down his escalator. And it was designed less to protect national social welfare than to liberalize trade and even national regulations, as embodied in the WTO, after all, a creation of the 1990s.
So I think it would be too simple to say that Trump is out to undo the post World War II economic order. It's possible that the oft invoked 1930s scenario of beggar thy neighbor policies will return. But some, on the new right today, could be interpreted as grasping at a restoration of some kind of embedded liberalism with national manufacturing, nationally bounded businesses, reshored supply chains, perhaps not the part of expanding social welfarism. Still, other parts of the administration, including Trump himself, more recently, have harked back to the 19th century when tariffs raised most government revenue and protected industry.
But turning to US security policy. I think that viewing current events through the lens of 1945 risks assuming that the United States had been dutifully carrying on the postwar legacy until the Trumpian rupture of the past decade.
There's a reason why no less a Cold warrior than the Reaganite neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote in 1990 that the United States should wind down most of its overseas security alliances and military garrisons and become, as she titled her essay, a normal country in a normal time. To her, the United States had mobilized global power to counter specific threats, that of totalitarian great powers with manifest expansionist ambitions. Once those powers went away, in her view, it only made sense that the United States should retract its power projection and wait to see if comparable threats ever arose.
She anticipated that if, instead, the United States pursued global primacy in the absence of such threats, it would turn its preeminence into an endless project of world order management, which she feared would drift away from any tethering in American interests, and ultimately, be rejected by the American public. And I think it's worth asking whether she foresaw some of the dilemmas the United States is facing now, although she did underestimate quite the ambition of the post-Cold war United States insofar as subsequent administrations not only retained, but also expanded American security alliances and objectives.
They did so, of course, often in the name of upholding the post World War II tradition. But in a sense, they adopted a different, more forward leaning principle from the one the United States actually employed in World War II and the Cold War. An important planning document from the Pentagon in 1992 makes this point implicitly. It argues that the United States had been too slow to grasp the dangers of the 1940s, first of the Axis powers, then of Soviet-backed Communism, and that almost led to disaster.
And so, instead of following in the footsteps of old, the United States should sustain its alliances and forward military presence all the time, regardless of circumstances, rather than demobilize and then be prepared to remobilize according to threats. In effect, the United States had to maintain overwhelming military power because it couldn't trust itself to pull back. It might enjoy that too much and become complacent. My gloss, of course, not that of Dick Cheney's Pentagon at the time.
So 35 years later, here we are. NATO and Russia are confronting each other in Ukraine. A former Soviet Republic that no American in the 1950s could have believed was vital to the security of the United States. How did we get here? Less because the United States kept upholding the post '45 order then because it pursued unipolar dominance, which has led NATO to double in size in terms of its member states from its Cold War membership as of the end of 1990.
NATO itself morphed from an organization centered on deterrence and defense to a continually expanding political military club. And the United States pledged to defend new members, it's true, but less because it was willing to fight for them than because it believed that by pledging to fight for them, by bringing them into NATO, no attack would occur, and no defense would become necessary.
So if you look back to read the Senate debate over the 2004 round of enlargement, when, among others, the three small Baltic states, also former Soviet Republics, were admitted, the Senate unanimously approved that round, but scarcely debated it. And this suggests, to me, a consensus that was wide, at least among the political class, but not deep. As a result, I think you would say could say much the same thing about the consensus around the larger pursuit of primacy in the United States.
So the United States today isn't so much walking away from an 80-year-old tradition as it is grappling, for the first time, with just how much it wishes to do for its recently acquired allies in Eastern Europe in the face of a Russian conventional military threat that's real and persistent, but nothing like the scale of the threat to dominate Europe that the Soviet Union posed.
And turning to Asia today, again, the United States is grappling with a specifically post-Cold War phenomenon, the rise of China in the shadow of a post-Cold War policy of the United States, known as the engagement strategy. Under that strategy, China was supposed to focus on economic growth without challenging the military primacy of the United States in Asia.
Secondly, China was supposed to liberalize, especially economically, and become a responsible stakeholder or junior partner to the United States in managing global problems. China, in the event, has had other ideas to be a great power with its own set of interests, weary of America's security role in its own region and of America's pressure to see it change.
The example of FDR, however, might have suggested a different course of action, as Professor Manela has written, FDR foresaw China's rise, admitted it into the Security Council as a permanent member. So, perhaps, arguably, plausibly, he might have counseled more of a coexistence approach from the start with less emphasis on liberalizing China, and a more determined effort to work out terms of coexistence with China as a great power.
Instead, I would say, to really simplify, the United States has, instead, attempted engagement with China, and more recently shifted to the quasi containment of China. And it has passed over or relegated to a secondary objective, the option of seeking a competitive coexistence with a powerful great power, China.
So to conclude, I think that throughout the post-Cold War period and up to the present, American leaders have sometimes deflected away from the choices they were making, in their moment, by claiming the mantle of World War II, which remains a touchstone of legitimacy, of course, not just in the United States, but in many other countries in the world, as we've heard in China, too.
Since Trump's rise, his critics have accused him of weakening the postwar order. He himself, ironically, offers his own appeal to nostalgia, Make America Great Again. And while it's never quite clear when he thinks America had been great and then things went South, sometimes, he'll reference his own mid-20th century figures like General Patton and General MacArthur.
So I think it's important for the country to be able to face its choices squarely now in a competitive post unipolar world, at least by reflecting critically on our recent trajectory, and without being impeded by a fear of deviating from an orthodoxy supposedly established 80 years ago. In that regard, I think Trump and the Trump right has beaten Democrats and the center to the punch. And here's one way in which Trump is breaking from a post-war tradition.
Every president from FDR to Barack Obama invoked the Specter of Isolationism as something to be avoided, except now Donald Trump. Trump doesn't advocate isolationism. He just doesn't speak of it at all, just as he doesn't speak of the post '45 international order one way or another. That indifference does seem to mark an important break on the level of ideas and ideology.
But where the break is leading on the level of strategy and policy remains very much undetermined. Basically, we could imagine two possible trajectories. One of them would be a real break with global military primacy. For example, this administration seems most likely to do so, if it does, by withdrawing US conventional forces, in some measure, from Europe and shifting the primary burden there onto European allies.
So far, however, if Trump might seem, in principle, open to such a course, he certainly hasn't delivered it. He's been the President of the United States for almost five years, and he hasn't delivered a retraction of American power from the world, but rather, I think, more what the political scientist Barry Posen calls illiberal hegemony. He has retained all the alliances and most of the indefinite military deployments that he inherited, but he's more coercive and transactional with allies, adversaries, and third countries alike.
So I will leave it there and very much look forward to our discussion.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much, Stephen. And thank you, Margaret and Rana, for giving us really so much to think about, to talk about, and for doing all of that on time. I'm going to throw a couple of-- maybe a question or two at the panel, and then, give our audience time to think of the questions they have for the panel and put them in the Q&A. And then, we'll turn to that.
So each of you took the topic from a different perspective, but it seemed to me that all of you agreed, one, that we are currently at some sort of inflection point. That there is an order that's fraying in ways that are different from the past. And number two, and this is a point that Margaret made first, but was reiterated in different ways by Rana and Stephen, that the way we conceive of the history of the Second World War, but even going back to the First World War, the great wars of the 20th century, really shapes the way we think about the current moment and potential ways forward.
I was struck, Rana, I'm also interested in China in a far more amateurish ways-- amateurish way relative to you. But I also noticed some of the things that you were talking about with regard to the presentation of the 80th anniversary to 1945 in recent Chinese discourse and practice.
A couple of things that struck me as really fascinating. One is what you mentioned, which is the Chinese are now-- the PRC is now positioning itself as the protector of the post-World War II order, the protector of the United Nations and the collective security that it promises.
And the other thing that I noticed, or the other maybe a couple of things is there is, as you mentioned, there is a reconfiguration of World War II as a time when Chinese were all united, which is why it's easier now to talk about the nationalists because the nationalists and the Communists, according to this scheme, were together in fighting against the Japanese.
And the other thing I noticed is that they, of course, they talk about this as the anti-Japanse war. But now, that title is often coupled with anti-Japanese, anti-fascist war. Anti-Japanese, anti-fascist war. And sometimes, you feel that the emphasis has moved from the Japanese to the fascists with fairly obvious contemporary resonances.
There is an implication, mostly left unsaid, but an implication that fascism has reared up its head in the world again, and that China is once again at the forefront of standing against it. And of course, this dovetails quite well with Putin's claims that he's fighting fascism in Ukraine and that sort of thing.
So what I wanted to ask you is how-- and Margaret, you pointed out the fact that the major figures in constructing the post '45 order were very much active-- many of them, if not all of them, are very much active in World War I, and saw themselves, to a very great degree, as implementing the lessons of the collapse of the post-World War I arrangement and trying to put together something better that won't fall apart in the spectacular way that the post-World War I order fell apart.
And I'm wondering, if we take that analogy of being imbued with the lessons of the past to the present, what sort of lessons should leaders today who are trying to think about-- leaders or scholars or public intellectuals who are trying to think about, let's say, a better, more stable future, what sort of lessons should they take from the history of World War II and the post-war order.
And I ask this specifically because, well, among other things, because one of the lessons that were taken from the interwar period was that revisionist powers will try to overthrow the system that was set up. This was, of course, Germany first and foremost, but Japan as well. And of course, our colleague Rana and I and my colleague Graham Allison has written about this as liquidities trap.
But what's interesting, it seems to me, and I may be wrong about this, what's interesting about the present moment is it's the established power is trying to take apart the order, being the United States, is trying to take apart the existing order. Whereas, the supposedly revisionist power, according to Allison, namely China, is trying to-- or at least rhetorically-- trying to stand up for it and keep it together.
So I'm wondering what we make of this as historians and as people who are thinking about these issues. Margaret, you go ahead.
MARGARET MACMILLAN: OK, well, what strikes me about history is what Rana was talking about, and Steven as well, the ways in which history is being used. I mean, if we could rely on objective, as much as we always can, view of the past, but history has now been called into service in various national narratives.
This is somehow an assumption, and we see it in all societies, whether Democratic or authoritarian, that history is some sort of judge. That there is this person sitting there with white hair or white beard saying, you're right, you're wrong. And this, I think, is-- and we see the manipulation of history.
But if we look at the First World War, Second World War and the lessons taken from it, I think the lessons were very clear that you have to have an order which contains would be revisionist powers. You have to have a way for them to express what they want to revise without them resorting to force, and that no order can take too much pressure on it. There's a point at which it simply becomes unsustainable. The more Hitler and Mussolini and Japan got away with things, the less likely it was to stop them. And we may be reaching that point now.
I think the other danger is we just get used to the existing system. And we look back at the Cold War and we think we got through it. It was all fine. What I think we don't remember so much is just the sheer role of accident. And we escaped a couple of near catastrophes in the Second World-- in the post-- in the Cold War. I think we've become more aware, in fact, rather than less of just how dangerous some of those occasions were.
And what really concerns me about today is we seem to think we can go on the same way and pressing against the system, talking against each other, struggling against each other. I mean, on many levels, I mean, the Russians and others and the Chinese, and I'm sure powers like the United States, are fighting on any number of levels. They're fighting in cyberspace, they're fighting in actual space, they're using disinformation.
But at a certain point, how much can the system take? And I think this is what worries me. And what worries me always is the possibility of an accident, something going wrong. I think, in a way, we're playing with fire. And I'm worried that enough of our leaders aren't thinking this.
As far as the United States go, yes, in many ways, it is a revisionist power, I think. It's throwing up an order which seemed to do-- seems to suit it fairly well. I do think we can never underestimate the role of individuals. I don't think President Trump is doing this on his own, but he has an extraordinary capacity for articulating and bringing together the resentments and concerns of those who feel, for various reasons, that they've got left out, or they don't like the role that the United States is taking in the world, or they like the way the world is going.
And I think, without him, the revisionist United States would not have appeared to be so strong. So I think it's always a combination of great force and individuals. But I do think he is playing an enormously important role here in American policy.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you. Rana.
RANA MITTER: I mean, so much there which is rich and thoughtful to comment on. Let me just focus in on one particular aspect, which, I think has been implied, but again, not perhaps, given a specific strand of its own, so I'll throw it into the conversation.
If we think about many things that define the Second World War, again, the point of origin of the system that we're now discussing, the fragile continuation of, I think the question of technology is one that really looms very large in retrospect.
I mean, in one sense, there was a realization, even, I think, amongst the Axis powers, that once the United States had entered the war, in a sense, forced in by Japan, you might say, that the margin for victory for the Axis powers depended on them being able to come up with some sort of deal before the almost undeniable, inexorable, industrial capacity and innovation capacity of the United States was brought to bear. And indeed, so it proved.
I mean, perhaps in the most terrible sense, but technologically, of course, at the cutting edge in terms of the atomic bombings of Japan, which, again, said something not just about the sheer brute capacity of the United States to bring together a project, but also its capacity, which, of course, Nazi Germany had, essentially, foolishly squandered of taking brilliant minds from around the world and bringing them together in the service of one particular project.
So let's translate, perhaps, some of those sort of longer range technological questions to where we are now. I think there is a growing sense, and it's a very uneasy sense because none of us know quite how to define it, that artificial intelligence is going to be at the heart of a great many questions that shape the next decade or so, not just in terms of typing our questions into a chatbot, but in terms of the continuing embedding of forms of AI into everything from health care to financial decisions to, ultimately, the decision makings of states as well, the capacity to process huge amounts of data and outsource some of those questions.
Now, Margaret put her finger on one of the most horrifying possibilities that didn't, in the end, happen in the Cold War, which was an accident. But just yesterday, I was on, actually, a similar Zoom with my great colleague at HKS, Fred Logevall, Pulitzer Prize winning historian of John F. Kennedy. And we did talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis, of course, as one of those moments.
Well, one of the biggest debates going on in the world right now in the context of that post 1945 global order is, what do we do about AI and nuclear weapons? What do we do about AI and life sciences? What do we do about AI in general?
I am not encouraged, at the moment, by as a very-- I don't sit inside these discussions, but as an amateur observing from outside the lack of progress we seem to see, at the moment, about understanding how the capacities of AI, which are very kind of fast moving and shape-shifting, are going to be handled by the great powers.
There is an emerging and very powerful AI environment within China. We all know that. There is certainly one emerging within the United States, and that's probably the one that ends up shaping Europe and other parts of the Western world because Europe doesn't really have its own AI capacity generation at the moment. That might change, but that's not where it is at this present moment.
Those are the sorts of underlying technological questions that, I think, the current system, as it stands, does not seem capable of being able to contain. What that means, we get a better-- whether we get a better system, or whether we get a return to some sort of competitive anarchy, I think, is one of the most compelling and bleakest questions of our moment. But perhaps Steven or someone else will come up with a more optimistic take.
STEPHEN WERTHEIM: Oh, well, I certainly hope that's not going to be my role. But let me just offer a couple of things that I would take away as sort of tasks for this moment. And to echo professor MacMillan, I think it has become rather urgent to recover the historical imagination of great power war, not to, necessarily, remember all the details from World War I or World War II, but to understand what kind of profound impact it had even for the victors in the war.
And it's not just the United States, but all the major powers of the world today that continue to reduce the memory of World War II as time goes on to a tool of political legitimation, separate from, detached from the actual experience. In the American case, during the early Cold War, when presidents like Truman and Eisenhower invoked World War II, they did so as often as a cautionary tale as a triumphant one.
So the dual lesson of World War II for them was, yes, the United States had to use its power and risk things to stand up to aggressors, but also, it had to avoid another catastrophe like World War II. And in fact, they recognized, this time, it'll be much worse for the United States because of the presence of nuclear weapons.
And so when the United States constructed its alliance system first in Europe and then in Asia by the end of the 1950s, in a sense, it knew what it was signing up for. Now, there was still a significant debate about, well, what exactly would the United States do to live up to its defense obligations? There's quite a bit of wriggle room in Article V of the North Atlantic Charter, for example.
But still, as a country, it was aware of what the kinds of-- what the scale of the costs would be if it had to defend an ally. And today, that seems comparitively absent. And when post-Cold War presidents invoke World War II, they do so almost uniformly to tell the triumphant tale. We can never revert to isolationism. The United States needs to lead.
And the cautionary tale has dropped out. And now that the United States is facing plausible scenarios of conflict with either Russia or China, I don't think that, as a country, we have internalized the risks that, in effect, we are taking. I certainly hope it won't take a catastrophe to change that state of affairs. So I hope that it's a task for historians and others to bring this historical imagination to bear without having to suffer from direct experience.
The second, quickly, lesson I would take is there was a discussion in the 1930s that, to some extent, informed the postwar settlement of peaceful change in international relations. This was a theme of discussion. How to allow revisionist powers to achieve some of their rising expectations according to the growth of their power without it leading to war.
And I think that has been elusive in American foreign policy thinking since the end of the Cold War, at least. You could argue that the engagement policy toward China was a vision of peaceful change. It's literally true. The United States wanted to see China change. It also didn't want to go to war.
But it was really change on American terms. I think the premise of peaceful change from the mid-20th century was that powers will want to seek changes that the status quo powers don't want to see, but nevertheless should make some serious efforts to accommodate because that's the way international relations works. So I think some degree of recovery of that concept would probably serve us well.
EREZ MANELA: OK, we have a few questions now gathered in the Q&A. So let's turn there. But before we do that, let me just make one additional, perhaps, provocation-- revisionist comment, if I may, which is to remind us that there is, I think, a premise under our discussion and in the way that we-- I have framed this conversation that assumes that the last 80 years have, broadly speaking, seen an international order that was good, that was stable, whose dissolution we ought to regret.
And I think there are good arguments for that point of view. And most of the time, I find myself agreeing with it. But at the same time, one can't ignore a rising voice among historians, Cold War historians, post-Cold War historians that say the following, pushing back against John Lewis Gaddis's famous long peace interpretation of the Cold War and saying, actually, the decades after World War II saw vast death and destruction did not see great power war, but saw vast death and destruction in all sorts of parts of the world, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Central America, in Angola, in Iran and Iraq and the Iran-Iraq war, and of course, the vast destruction in both Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the post-- immediate post-Cold War period, even before we get to the recent outbursts of violence in various parts of the world that we are assuming are part of this dissolution.
So I just want to put that out there and ask, just very briefly, because we don't have that much time, if that carries any-- that interpretation or that argument carries any sort of useful lesson for us in terms of maybe we ought to see the post-Cold War order change.
MARGARET MACMILLAN: Do you want me to make a very brief?
EREZ MANELA: Please, if you're willing. Yes.
MARGARET MACMILLAN: Yeah, I think this is what we should be doing as historians. We should always be revising the past and asking awkward questions. And there was probably a war somewhere in the world every year since 1945.
But what we did have was an international order where, I think, public opinion counted, where you had powers that were prepared to support the United Nations, prepared to put the blue helmets on, and prepared to do the reconstruction necessary after conflict. So, no, it was not a perfect war. And you could argue that the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and then the NATO action in Afghanistan, that the coalition invasion and occupation of Iraq were mistakes and did not produce lasting results and establish regimes which were good for their people.
But I still think that, by comparison with what seems to be happening today, it was better. And I still think there was some hope in it. Do we have as much hope today? I'm not sure.
STEPHEN WERTHEIM: Yeah, I certainly share the criticisms of the historians you alluded to-- I guess I'm one of them-- about what the Cold War period, and for that matter, the post-Cold War period has meant for, broadly speaking, the global South in terms of interventions by United States, Soviet Union, and other powerful actors.
I do think part of what prompted those interventions was the global ideological struggle. So if a country seemed to be turning Communist, especially if it had some degree of Soviet support, that would be a trigger for American-- potential American intervention or covert action.
And the big question today is, if the United States is-- and China, in particular, are headed for some sort of Cold War like contest, will that prompt the same kind of destructive interventions in weaker states that the original Cold War did? I'm concerned that it will.
But one reason you could say that it might not would be that the role of ideology might be less compelling. And if the competition is somewhat more narrowly a strategic competition, as opposed to one in which a change in regime somewhere is automatically seen as a loss for that side, that may reduce the pressure on the major powers to take that sort of action. Add it to which we saw a whole lot, as you alluded to, of US wars, particularly in the greater Middle East, in the post-Cold War period.
So I think it is possible either that focusing on a major power competition will discipline the United States as well as the opposite possibility that, in fact, it will produce new reasons to launch those kinds of interventions.
RANA MITTER: Oh, sure. Just a quick thought off the back of, I think, there's two very, very cogent comments. If we are moving, and perhaps we are, into a world in which major powers really are going to be quite inwardly focused, I mean, a great deal of the political turmoil in the United States at the moment is about internal politics within the US, I would venture, actually, in some ways, China is in a broadly similar position in that the current underperformance of the Chinese economy and a whole variety of actually really significant domestic changes and traumas.
And there's going to be long-term, including problems that have to do with demographics and the pension system, short-term, including mass youth unemployment. All these sorts of things I think are turning great powers inwards partly because they're not, I think, seeing that there is a very obvious globally-based solution to their various problems. And in fact, to some extent, particularly in the US, the language is now very explicitly about actually, we need to look inward to solve our problems. The outside world is not going to solve those problems for us.
I don't know if that means that we're, therefore, entering a world in which terms that involve those sorts of international connections, not just in terms of values, democracy, human rights, but actually, in terms of international trade and international regimes of regulation, whether over nuclear weapons or over trade, are simply going to be outmoded.
But certainly, I think, and again, Margaret and others will have something to say about this, perhaps, but whether we have in recent historical memory, certainly decades or even the last couple of centuries, had a world in which, actually, the lack of ideological interest in global order has been so notable. Up to this point, certainly in the last century, there's always been someone out there, one way or another, who wants to reshape the world according to a particular set of ideas.
I wonder if we have that sort of great power in the world at the moment? I'm not suggesting it would be a good or a bad thing, necessarily, but just that it does, perhaps, seem different.
EREZ MANELA: OK, let me pick a couple of quick questions from the audience and put them in front of you. And then, give each of you a minute to reflect on either both of them or make whatever closing statement you would like. One question from Jeongkoo reminds us that, in the 1950s, the United States government, essentially, expelled from the United States the Chinese scientist Qian Sanqiang, who then went on to build the-- as part of McCarthyism and so forth. And then, who then went on to become one of the fathers of the Chinese nuclear program.
And John is wondering whether we're seeing-- we might be seeing something similar today with the hostility to Chinese students and scholars in the United States. That's one question. And then, the second question from Shinju Fujihara references, Stephen, your reference to John Ruggie's embedded liberalism, and asks whether we can see the sorts of things that the Trump administration is doing offering-- trying, at least rhetorically, trying to offer protections to losers of quote unquote "globalization" at home, whether we can see this as a return of-- a return to some aspect of embedded liberalism.
Maybe, Margaret, do you want to go first? Or how do you-- whatever order you prefer.
MARGARET MACMILLAN: You're only doing it because I'm the oldest. Anyway.
EREZ MANELA: No, because you went first to begin with. We can do it a different way, if you prefer.
MARGARET MACMILLAN: No, no. Well, look, both very good questions. Let me deal with the loss of talent. It's not just Chinese scholars. It's scholars from around the world who are now not sure that they will be welcome at American universities or whose research grants have been cut.
And this seems to me, potentially, very damaging for the United States. Because one of its great strengths has always been that it's been an attractive place for people from around the world to come. That people have admired the liberal values, the openness-- and I mean small liberal values, the openness of the United States. The potential of the United States. The love of learning and big American-- great American universities. And so I do worry that the United States is damaging itself by this.
And we know that power is something that fluctuates. It's not a hard object that you carry around. It changes. And power depends on many things. And I suspect this is going to damage the United States in the long run.
RANA MITTER: Yeah, sure is. Well, briefly on that question following up. I think it's worth noting that I'm not sure that China is necessarily going to benefit from the changes in international student research habits because China has not traditionally been a terribly easy or, indeed, welcoming place in terms of a wide range of international scholars in that sense.
And while I think China will continue to have a steady stream of people coming from outside, actually, I wonder if one of the effects might be that, not now, but certainly in the next few years, other places where people, essentially, feel that there's a sufficient base to do science and research may begin to emerge more strongly.
Obviously, it's an opportunity for Europe, potentially, although I don't yet see that Europe is actually putting in the kind of resources and combined effort that will necessarily take full advantage of the opportunity.
We can also imagine, for instance, places in Southeast Asia as they continue to become richer and develop their scientific bases more may be considered relatively easier place. I mean, Singapore is a place that, I think-- although it's small, obviously-- is really putting a lot of effort into becoming a kind of global technology hub.
And I wonder whether it might become one of those sort of sites in the world, a bit like Switzerland, you would say, where although the country is small, the way in which it has managed to focus in a niche but important area of scientific development has given it all sorts of opportunities that otherwise might not have come to it. So I will be looking out for that.
EREZ MANELA: Stephen, the final word, briefly, please.
STEPHEN WERTHEIM: Wonderful. Yeah, I mean, just on the expulsion of some Chinese students and the severing of research links. I am concerned about this. I think, to be fair to American policymakers, deep economic and research connections with a security rival, this is a kind of distinct situation from that of the Cold War, and it does pose security challenges.
But on the other hand, perhaps, it gives some weight-- the costs of this will give some weight to the notion that trying to seek competitive coexistence and mute the worst excesses of a Cold War like approach might be a good idea.
Just on globalization, I don't think that's-- what Trump's policies are, in fact, doing is protecting losers from globalization, much less trying to bring back the embedded liberalism of the 1950s. But my point is just more that, because of the profound changes in globalization and international economic arrangements and institutions today, it's certainly not straightforward to say what you would even do to try to recreate the embedded liberalism conditions.
And it would make sense why some, in Trump's orbit, might think of themselves as trying to achieve something like that under our current circumstances.
EREZ MANELA: Thank you very much, Stephen, Rana, and Margaret, and thank you everyone for joining us. We had more than 100 participants-- audience members join us. And we'll see you, hopefully, next time at the next Weatherhead Forum.
RANA MITTER: Thanks, everyone.
EREZ MANELA: Bye bye.
STEPHEN WERTHEIM: Thank you.