Trump

Ambassador Frank Lavin: Winning Elections – Reagan, Bush, Trump and Election 2020

Ambassador Frank Lavin has been a fixture in Republican politics for the last 40 years.

He worked for President Reagan as his head of politics, advised President George H.W. Bush and under President George W Bush, he was appointed US Ambassador to Singapore in 2001.

A prolific author for global publications, Frank had a second career in Asian finance and is now CEO and founder of ‘Export Now’.

A prominent ‘Never Trumper’, he has been a vocal critic of the Donald Trump Administration.

Misha Zelinsky caught up with Frank for a chinwag about Election 2020 and whether Trump can fight back and win, why elections are defined by what voters don’t want,  what made Ronald Reagan the politician of his era, how politics has changed for the worse today, the future of the Republican Party, the secret to winning Presidential races and what the rise of an authoritarian China means for the US, Australia and the world.

It’s a wide ranging chat.

We want to say that Frank absolutely wins the award of best BBQ answer in the history of the show!

Transcript

Misha Zelinsky:
Frank, welcome to the show.

Frank Lavin:

Thanks. Thanks Misha, glad to be here.

Misha Zelinsky:

And thank you so much for joining us on Diplomates this week. Now you are in Singapore for the audio tape?

Frank Lavin:

I am locked down in Singapore. My business is actually in Shanghai, but I bunk in Singapore because that’s where my wife works. And it so happened when the curtain came down on Coronavirus, I was locked down here, and here I’ve been for about the last six or seven months.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah. Right. It’s a tough time everywhere at the moment, and no doubt we’ll cover Corona. But there’s so many things I’d like to talk to you about in terms of your personal very long career in politics, but given that we are now very near to the US presidential election, and clearly that’s what everyone’s tuning in for, I thought we might start with the election. You wrote a piece recently, I thought we could start here, you wrote a piece recently saying, don’t really focus on what voters want, focus on what they don’t want. What did you mean by that? And what does that mean for the election?

Frank Lavin:

I think this is a global phenomenon. When we have a public discussion and we articulate our preferences, we typically do so in terms of upside and aspirations. Where do we want our country to go? What kind of political leadership do we want? So that’s typically the currency of public discussion. However, in decision making theory, it’s very different than that. It’s people vote their fears, they vote negative, they can identify the greatest threat or the greatest risk, and that’s what they vote against. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence to take examples from this cycle, Misha. I think we can make a pretty strong case that the rather crowded Democratic field this time, Joe Biden was the least flawed candidate. He was the person who you had a hard time voting against if you were a Democrat, but the other people all had different sort of flaws, personal flaws, ideological flaws, and so forth that made them weak and turned, I think, a lot of Democrats with them.

And I think also Kamala Harris of the candidates mentioned for running mate that she was the least flawed running mates. So they ended up with a package that is broadly acceptable to Democrats rank and file. But if you typically vote Democratic you’re going to be very comfortable voting for Biden and Harris.

Misha Zelinsky:

And so the state of the race, I mean, it’s been pretty set for some time now, polling, and I think as has a lot of people nervous because of what happened in 2016, but if you believe the polling, Biden’s ahead nationally considerably, he’s ahead in most of the battleground states and key states. Firstly, do you think that’s the state of the race? And then secondly, I mean, can Trump come from behind with only a number of weeks left?

Frank Lavin:

Yeah. And look, I think a race with an incumbent in it is overwhelmingly a referendum on that incumbent. So what the polls are telling us, and I do think they’re accurate, is voters would prefer someone other than Trump. But Trump has already sort of lost the job interview, he’s already failed the job interview. It’s not 100% clear if Biden’s passed the job interview, but they’ve already decided they don’t want to renew Trump’s lease for another four years. And no surprise that the poll numbers are stable, Trump is a known quantity and Biden is a known quantity. So it’s not as if you are going to discover something new about Donald Trump in the next 30 days that might change your mind. I think it’s going to tighten up a little bit. I think Trump has a better chance to improve his standing than Biden does, meaning I think Biden’s more or less at his ceiling of around 50%, but Trump is underperforming I think a bit at about 42%.

So I think Trump can go up a point or two, but I think he has trouble going beyond that. So I would still, subject to the one big question mark that’s left in these last six weeks, Misha, is the three presidential debates. So subject to something egregious taking place in those debates of normal performance, more or less a draw, I think Biden wins, and I think he ends up winning by about four points or so.

Misha Zelinsky:

And so, I mean, the other big thing underway now, and it’s crazy to think of all the things that have happened in this term, we’ve had an impeachment, which seems it’s not going to be even a factor in this election though, whether or not it’s perhaps baked into Trump’s numbers. You’ve got the Supreme Court nomination situation, do you think the replacement of RBG, do you think this is going to be a factor or does it net out both sides? Is it a positive for the Democrats in the suburbs? How do you see that playing out as an election issue? And then we might even-

Frank Lavin:

Yeah, I’ll give you a political science answer, meaning I do think it nets out even in that passion on both sides is even. But I think that phenomenon plays to the advantage of the front runner because you’ve got a front runner, as you point out, is in a rather static position, six, eight points up, there’s only 42 days left, and if you’re going to eat up five or 10 of those days with Senate hearings, you’re absorbing the news. The insurgent or the underdog doesn’t have the opportunity to make his case. So if Biden can run out the clock a bit, I think that just helps him at the margin. It just takes Trump off message and it doesn’t help him close the gap at all.

Misha Zelinsky:

And so, we talked about the campaigns, and you’re a veteran of many Republican campaigns over a very long number of years … Debates, there’s always a lot of focus on them. Do you think they matter at all? And then like, I mean, what would you be looking for as a Republican strategist at the three debates? You sort of said if it’s a draw it won’t matter, but I suppose what makes a draw first? And then secondly, do they matter at all in the context of a long electoral cycle and campaign?

Frank Lavin:

I would score these debates, I think they do matter, but the metric … it’s easy to have the wrong metric. Meaning the wrong metric here is an academic debate scorecard where your typical academic debate, should Britain go ahead with Brexit or something, and it’s the Oxford society has this debate and the judges vote 82 to 77 that the highest side, the affirmative side won, that’s the wrong way of doing it.

Because look, somebody is going to do marginally better than the other person, on points, but what I’m saying is that aspect of the debate, I don’t think matters much. I think, look at debate as a threshold set of performance questions, meaning, did each candidate perform adequately? Did they perform to the moment? Were they more or less in their game, on their game, spoke to their constituency, spoke to the issue, stayed on message, were more or less disciplined and messaging, no egregious faults or failures.

If they basically do an adequate job, then it’s tied. It’s a wash, meaning I think Biden supporters simply want to be reassured that their candidate is okay, and Trump voters the same, but the stakes are a little higher for Biden. Trump has chosen over the last six months to make Biden’s age a bit of an issue. And so there’ll be some scrutiny on that point, but if you watched the Democratic primary debate, Biden did fine. Biden certainly passed any kind of threshold criteria. And if you watch, there’s a recent, they call these town hall meetings, recent sort of an open question format on, I think one of the networks are US ABC. And again, Biden did fine. It wasn’t … these are sort of man on the street questions. So they’re not exactly hardball questions. But he had no gaps, no gaffs, no … he did perfectly fine on these questions.

So I think the rap that he’s somehow drifting, or not up to it or not engaged, I don’t see any evidence of that. But God forbid, from the Biden perspective, if he loses his train of thought, or has a gap in something, he will pay a price for that.

Misha Zelinsky:

Do you think those … somewhat ironic, but do you think that perhaps Trump has mis-played this in that he’s lowered the threshold of success for Biden? He’s managed his expectations down so much that if Joe turns up and is basically coherent, to your point, that’s a tick?

Frank Lavin:

I think you’re right. And I think also, there’s an element of Biden’s stage presence that has a bit of charm to it. Meaning, the guy is loquacious. But that’s very different than saying he’s senile. I mean the guy over talks issues, and he has odd verbal tics, like a lot of people in public life , so he’ll use a phrase, stock phrase, like “Come on, man,” to enforce a point, which you could says is rhetorically weak. But it has a certain amount of every-man charm to it. Right? It’s not pretentious, he’s not quoting Latin, and he is an authentic person. He is a man of the streets. So I think rapping him for that doesn’t help Trump.

He also uses the invective at the end of some sentences, “I’m serious,” which again is a painfully weak rhetorical device. But it is authentic, it is Joe Biden. If you don’t believe this guy is the major party nominee, front runner for President, that he’s serious when he makes a point, there’s nothing … the least effective way of convincing you he’s serious is to say “I’m serious.” So he’s not a rhetorical master. But again, there’s a certain charm in the every day unpretentiousness of his approach.

Misha Zelinsky:

So stepping out to the campaigns more generally, how do you see campaigning today as being different to the way campaigns have been traditionally run? Is there a difference? One of the big things people talk about is that so much is focused now on turning out your own vote, turning out your base vote, rather than persuasion of undecided voters. But how do you see campaigns today compared to the way they’ve been run over the last …

Frank Lavin:

There’s been a few shifts in my short political life, but over the last few decades, one shift has been the prevalence of digital communications. It means we’re rewarding depth rather than breadth. We’re rewarding people who might own an issue or a segment of the issue, rather than rewarding someone who can get 51%. So pugnacity is important. You’ve got the most cluttered media environment in the world, and you have to break through that. So there’s always a temptation to say something outrageous, or be outrageous.

Trump is a very good example of that. I think he’d say, if you asked Trump “What are the rules of communication?” He’d say “Rule number one is, never be dull.” And boy, Trump owns that segment of the population of people.

Misha Zelinsky:

He doesn’t breach that rule.

Frank Lavin:

Right. And there’s a certain segment, call it the WWF segment, that says I can’t necessarily follow the issues or follow the policies, but I can tell who the most combative person is. And I warm to that person. And I think I want a fighter, so the person who uses the toughest rhetoric has my vote. By the way, I think you pay a price for that in all sorts of ways as well, but you can see that Trump captures some advantage out of tone and temperament. So there’s been a drift toward that kind of fragmentation of the market, there’s been a reward toward pugnacity, and on the same token I’d say with some regret, there’s been a real shift away from management expertise. That we want someone that can actually run a government program, or run a solution, or find the best way. So if we have problems with high school dropouts, we want someone who’s the most emotional about that issue, and not the who says “I have a seven point plan to reduce high school dropouts,” “Here’s some ideas that will work to reduce high school dropouts.”

So there’s been a real deterioration in the dynamic for somebody who’s got management expertise, and I’d say on the same token, it seems every single cycle we strip out the one remaining element of the process that would reward some time of political leadership to say … make it have some elements of a parliamentary system. The last time that was done was Democrats stripped out, largely, the value of the so-called super-delegates, where they had somewhat of a parliamentary element to their process, where they said “We’re going to let sitting members of Congress and Governors and Senators each have a vote,” and then they said later “No, we were just sort of kidding about that. We don’t want that.” And that was a concession that Hillary Clinton had to make to the Bernie Sanders group. Because obviously those people would look at Bernie Sanders as the answer and he said for his loyalty you have to dilute that group’s power.

So we’re in to a point now where it’s pure vote, with no intermediary institution or individual. So that rewards that emotional content, that rewards that communication skill, and it really de-values both management and leadership or resume. It’s very interesting to me that the last two presidents, Trump and Obama, were two presidents that had very strong communication skills. Both of them love the rally format, large-scale, large mass, very strong emotional connectivity with the base. And neither of them ran on the basis of a government record. Presumably, Obama’s the only one who could have, but he’d been in the Senate for two years. There was no Obama bill, no Obama history, and he knew that. He knew that. He said “What I can do better than anybody else is communicate, and form that emotional bond.” And he did that very effectively.

So we’re in an era now where that sort of populism dominates the process, and saying “I am the master of the Senate, I’m Lyndon Johnson, and I orchestrated 40 pieces of legislation and I’m moving America a certain way,” we said that doesn’t really matter anymore. Or doesn’t matter the way it used to. So that’s a huge shift in the electorate behavior in the last few decades.

Misha Zelinsky:

It’s interesting, isn’t it, because when you look at the Democratic primary, the governors, who all have presumably good government experience … who’ve got records … have not done well at all. And they didn’t even get through to Iowa. Whereas you look back to Bill Clinton in ’92, he was Governor of Arkansas and that was a good base for him to campaign. So interesting point you raise. But also, do you think that the lack of gatekeepers in major parties is a problem now? The so-called smoky back rooms, in terms of …

Frank Lavin:

I think we’d be better off with them playing some kind of role. There should be some median where … look, I’m fundamentally, I believe in democracy. So you want the voters to elect delegates, the delegates to elect … but I thought the idea of super-delegates or something like that made a lot of sense. To say “Look, this person who’s a member of Congress or Senator, Governor, has some awareness of the system and some capability to add to the conversation.” So I wouldn’t just simply discount that to zero. So I think that’s the happy medium, that voters can directly elect any delegate they want for any reason they want. But the incumbent members, those few hundred other people, are going to have their say as well. So then you have a bi-cameral process. A little bit like the UK labor party, right? Where they have direct membership, and they also have union leadership vote … different constituencies have different rights within the UK labor party.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, that’s right. Australia as well, it’s the leadership of the labor party is now decided by 50% vote of the rank and file membership, 50% by the union caucus. The colleagues of the candidates. And they know them best, presumably, right? So they know what they’re like.

Frank Lavin:

But that’s a members constituency, what you just described?

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, that’s right. So it’s like 50/50 college, so members of the labor party get a vote directly and then the other half of the vote is made up of people that are in the federal parliamentary caucus, along with the candidates.

Frank Lavin:

Right. Good. Well look, it’s not for me to tell Australia what to do, but I’d say that’s some kind of balance, that lets leadership play a role, but also rank and file of the man on the street play a role, would be helpful. And interestingly, of the leading candidates this cycle, two of them were not members of the party in any meaningful sense. Meaning Bernie Sanders was never a Democrat, and Donald Trump was never a Republican. So it’s extraordinary to me, you can sort of walk in off the street and through self-declaration just say “This looks interesting to me, why don’t I lead this party?” And to say “My, that’s a rather elastic political structure if somebody can just knock on the door.”

Biden, to his credit, has been a registered Democrat, active Democrat, for 40, 50 years. So that’s a much more traditional biography of the people we used to nominate.

Misha Zelinsky:

It’s essentially been a hostile takeover of the Republican party by Trump, and an attempted one by Sanders, and you’re right, I often remark to people that friends of mine that are Sanders people, who say “The Democratic party was very unfair to Bernie,” I say “Well, he’s not a member.” So you can understand there might be some hostility from an organization that someone is not a member of, to being colonized by. But that’s just an observation.

Now going right back … I want to zero in now on your experience. And we’ve talked a lot about the Republican party, you were of course Ronald Reagan’s political director. Way back with a legendary Republican president, sort of the beginning of the modern era in many ways … before we get into your experiences, what was Ronald Reagan like, as a person? And a man, and a President? I’m kind of curious for your take on that.

Frank Lavin:

Well, if I had to pick one word I’d say “Genial.” Meaning, I think an element of leadership is to project an amiability, and to be open to anybody’s opinions, questions, and to say “Look, it’s a world of opinions. Everybody’s got an opinion, everybody wants a hearing.” They view the President as some sort of Supreme-Court-type figure that they say “I want this, I’ve got this injustice, I’ve got this problem you need to fix, you need to help us.” So you need to have that in your mind when you take the job, that you’re going to have a lot of people knocking on the door, and coming in. And you better be able to treat them with respect and with kindness, and give everybody a good hearing.

So he was extremely good with that. And I suspect that came with a long history in movies, TV, and radio, where again, you’re a public figure. And Americans are just unabashed about approaching people and saying to Ronald Reagan the actor, “My cat just died, and I had named him Ronald after you. I’d like you to come to my cat’s funeral.” But Americans will say things like that, and you have to be able to say something gracious and polite to that person, and not “Get out of my way, you lunatic.” So Reagan was very, very good at offering empathy and trying to be compassionate with somebody, and trying to give the person the time of day and make sure the person is taken care of.

And he was a great guy to work with, as well. No static, no sharp elbows, I think he also, just as a human being, as a manager … you know, if you have all the power in the world you can be gracious. You can be kind. And the saying of the 1980s was, of all the different kind of people who end up in the West Wing, some of them quite difficult personalities, the two nicest people in the West Wing were Ronald Reagan and George Bush. And they were both old-school gentlemen, who were very … great guys to work with. And you could say anything to them, they’d respond. Very approachable. So I enjoyed that time with Reagan and with Bush.

Misha Zelinsky:

Let’s talk about Reagan and Bush. A lot of people talk today, they talk about President Trump and essentially he can’t take bad advice … and essentially anyone who stood up to him or had a different view has been run out of the White House. How did the White Houses operate under Presidents Reagan and Bush, and how would you give advice to the President, that might be contrary to what they’re thinking at the time?

Frank Lavin:

But that happens regularly in a professionally-managed organization, you set a tone from the top that we’re trying to go in a certain direction, trying to go in a certain path, but we want to hear about the trade offs, we want to hear about the cost, we want to hear about alternative paths. And that’s part of the policy process. And that’s why you have the … I was on the National Security Council staff, but that’s why you have that NSC process. To say “We’re all concerned about problem X, and there are three or four options in front of us, let’s look at the costs and benefits of these different approaches, and have a thoughtful discussion.”

So there was never a climate of hostility or stigmatizing the outlier. You wanted to make sure you always heard the outlier. So I said any … let’s make sure around the table that there’s at least one negative voice there, so we fully understand what might go wrong, and we don’t get into an odd kind of cheerleading dynamic of … we run cheering down some path, again we’re just reinforcing each other’s worst instincts.

So I thought Reagan and Bush were both good managers in that respect, I think you’re right, Trump doesn’t have a lot of policy depth, so he can’t always evaluate the trade offs, and then you overlay that with enormous personal sensitivity. So if you challenge him, it’s a personal slight. And he thinks you’re impugning him. So he must rebuff you, he must knock you down or swat you down. So you only learn by doing, and sometimes you don’t learn at all, right?

And the good thing about Reagan I would say, and Bush as well, is they each had a policy compass. They each knew where they wanted to go, and they’d also spend considerable time in public life. So they had a team, they had people they worked with, people they trusted, people who believed in them, had working responsibilities … so thy didn’t just wash up on the shores of the White House on election day and say “Let’s try to figure this out,” they had been at this search, and at this business of government, for decades. Right? So reasonably well-seasoned when they came into office. Trump really suffers from the fact that he … it’s kind of impressive that he won, but he won as the outsider, and as the contrarian with any kind of government background at all. And you pay a price for that. Because he didn’t have a team, he didn’t have thought-through position papers when he came into office.

Misha Zelinsky:

The Reagan era, the Bush one era, the 80s into the early 90s … politics has always been not a game for the fearful. So it’s always been very robustly-contested in the United States. But it strikes me, and certainly Biden talks about this a lot, it strikes me that politics has gotten nastier in recent times. And certainly nastier since that era. Would you agree with that? How did things happen in the back rooms, when you’d be talking to the other side, compared to what you observe today?

Frank Lavin:

I think there’s been enormous deterioration. You hate to lay it all on one person, but I’ve never seen a President act the way Trump acts with regard to how he describes political adversaries, or impugns them. But to have that kind of raw criticism, or mocking or scorn, of individuals and opponents from a Presidential statement, I think is beneath the office. I would say one of the first rules of serving as President is to act like a President, and to act with a degree of dignity. And if you want to take a shot at someone, we see Presidents do that. You can use humor, you can use back-handed or understated comments. People get the joke, people know what you’re saying. But to simply berate somebody and denigrate someone is, I think, appalling. And then he frequently does it in a context of their ethnicity, or their religion, or where they’re from. I think these are just appalling statements, that nobody in public life should act that way.

Misha Zelinsky:

The Republican party … you’re a long-time Republican. You got links right back to Reagan, Bush, and George W. Bush. I’m kind of curious about how the Republican party has changed. Because I often think, you look at Ronald Reagan’s record, and he’s considered to be the gold standard by many Republicans active today. But you look at his record as California Governor, and you think “Would he win a primary in 2020?” So what does that say about the modern Republican party, from your point?

Frank Lavin:

I think there are two or three things going on here. One of which we talked about, which is the rise of digital media, the rise of emotional populism, and this populist … I mean what is populism? One we discussed already is emotional connectivity, rather than a managerial approach to problems. Now that can be on the left or the right. But another element of populism is it’s grievance-based. Tell me what’s wrong, tell me what you don’t like, and I’ll speak to your grievances. Which on the one hand, all grievances need an airing, but on the other hand, if your messaging is entirely grievance-oriented, you’re not talking about solutions. And you’re not allowing people to feel comfortable about the direction of the country. So there’s the price you pay for being grievance …

I’d say a third area of populism, which is also a bit dangerous or risky, is populism’s message is exculpatory. Populism’s message is, “The problems we face today are because others have done this to us.” I would say, in most countries, it’s generally the opposite. The problems Australia faces today, are problems that Australians have made. The problems Americans face today are problems Americans have made, right? And if you have a problem with drug use, or high school dropouts, or street crime, or unemployment, or lack of racial equality, those are self-inflicted problems. Those weren’t problems that Japanese or Chinese steel makers hoisted upon us. So you can see the seduction of it, but there’s a bit of a danger in that if you’re telling people “Our problems are caused by someone else,” instead of saying “I want to bring a mirror, and I want you to look in this mirror and tell us what we’re doing wrong.”

And I’ll tell you the fourth element of populism, I would say, is policy choices have no trade-offs. We’re going down the wrong path, but don’t worry, I’m going to take us down the right path. But we know in government, almost all policy situations do have a trade-off. And you can be unhappy with the path we’re on, there are advantages and disadvantages, but the alternative one you’re suggesting is also going to have costs and benefits. So it’s not a question of right and wrong. But if you listen to a lot of the Trump rhetoric, and I would say some of the Obama rhetoric … well, Obama had a populist streak, but I don’t think he was as orthodox populist as Trump. But he had elements of that as well. So this populism dominates the moment, digital dominates the moment, as I said.

I’ll tell you something else that kind of opened the door to Trump, is the drift of the Democratic party. So I think you’re quite right to talk about what’s happened to Republicans, and how did they become more nationalist, and move away from some international leadership roles that you had under a Reagan presidency and a Bush presidency, but what happened to the Democratic party where the working man, the Union member, the factory worker, moved away from the Democrats? How did the Democrats become more new class, and more orthodox left, and more based in identity politics that is just uninviting to a lot of working class voters? Even if there’s still an economic orientation to the left?

What would give a multi-millionaire like Trump, who has nothing in common with the working man culturally, what would give him reach with that community that Hillary Clinton didn’t have? So it’s as much of an evolution of the Democratic party as for the Republican party.

Now Biden, to his credit, especially in the last two or three weeks, if you look at his speeches he’s keyed back into that working class voter a lot more. He talks about, he’s not an Ivy League College graduate, he went to a state school. So it’s a little bit of populism there, a little bit of us and them, but it’s a shot at Trump. It’s a little bit of saying, he has a theme of “My Dad told me you’re no better than anybody else, treat everybody with respect.” With a little Will Rogers egalitarianism. But that will play well. And again, it’s a shot at Trump, who’s sort of the regional elitist, and the regional snob.

So Biden, I think, gets it. That at least culturally, social and cultural bases, you’ve got to be able to speak to this constituency that I feel is cut adrift by the traditional Democratic party. And Republicans can reach out to it.

Misha Zelinsky:

It’s an interesting point. And this is not particular to the US Democrats, we’ve seen it with a lot of parties of the center-left around the world, where for whatever reason having a nationalist response to the economic concerns of working class voters. And the parties of the left are not, for whatever reason, connecting with the concerns of those people.

Frank Lavin:

And there’s also a social-cultural element here. Which look, I don’t think the Democratic party is guilty of this, I don’t think Joe Biden is guilty of this, but there’s elements of the Democratic party, and some of them are vocal elements, that for example call for open borders. That there should be no restrictions at all on immigration. See, that’s not a majority view, even with the Democrats. But I think Americans just find that unfathomable, that you would do that. And I think it’s as popular in America as it is in Australia.

But there’s a variant of that, called Sanctuary Cities, that city governments and municipal governments should not cooperate with Federal law enforcement in cases regarding illegal immigration. And you’d say “Look, this violates all sorts of government norms and constitutional norms, and you have local governments actively working to frustrate law enforcement.” And they’re projecting some kind of nobility on illegal immigrants. Which might be there in some cases, certainly there’s personal hardship there, but if there’s a legal warrant out for that individual, most people’s reaction is you need to honor that warrant. You need to process that person in the criminal justice system.

So there’s some exotic voices on the left that probably get more of a hearing than they deserve. It’s not a majority view, but it’s off-putting to rank and file historic Democrats who might normally pull the D lever. And look, let’s face it, the original Franklin Roosevelt sort of issues that got the Unions going and energized the Democratic party for a few generations, have largely been solved. So it’s a victim of their own success to say “We have 40 hour weeks, we have well-enforced safety and health regulations, and these sort of factors. We have funded retirements.” You know, it’s a comfortable life in the factory now, as opposed to 50 years ago.

I remember reading federal and OSHA, federal workplace hazard statistics that said … because I was going on a tour of a steel mill when I was a Congressman, I was talking to folks who worked at the steel mill. It said look, the injury rate and the fatality rate at a steel mill in the US is considerably lower than the injury rate and fatality rate working at a 7-11. So that’s a really successful journey. Because you can bet 50 or 100 years ago, working in a steel mill was quite a hazardous … there’s no safety anything, no guard rails, no safety goggles, no procedures. I’d guess it was a pretty miserable place, but now it’s a reasonable working environment.

Misha Zelinsky:

I know, we’ve got a lot of members that either work in steel, I’m from Wollongong, it’s a steel town … they’re good jobs, right? And that’s why it’s become such contested space to maintain and keep these jobs. You sort of touched on that before, the contest between the United States and China when it comes to trade. But just the Republican party, if Trump wins, it’s going to become the Trump party … probably in perpetuity. The hostile takeover would be complete. I’m kind of curious on your take, and you’re a never Trump-er I believe. If Trump loses, what happens next for the future of the Republican party? Some people think it’ll double down, you’ll end up with Donald Trump Jr. as the next proxy for that same nationalist … or is the more traditionalist, Bush Republican going to come back to the center?

Frank Lavin:

Well, I think it’s an open question. And a lot of it has to do with personalities as much as the philosophy and the themes. Meaning it’s not as if there’s a working caucus or faction that is a meaningful entity. It’s not like Japan, where you have LDP factions that stand for something, and then you group around them and they organize. You can’t really have that. And I say this meaning, what you have is this running, open debate/argument, fist fight policy papers, books, talk show, kind of behavior until you formally decide this with the primary seasons in four years.

And you’re going to have … you know, it’s open casting call. There’s no playoff bracket where you settle down. Anybody who wants to show up at the starting line for the race could show up at the starting line. So it’s a very inviting proposition, and indeed the market tends to overshoot. Meaning you tend to get 20 some people showing up saying “I think I’m interested in this job,” when you say “Well look, only half of them might really be serious and only a quarter of them really can go the difference.” But there’s no filtering mechanism. So I think we’re going to have a very open, loud, noisy, maybe at times painful debate on the future of the Republican party. And it is only settled during the primary process in 2024.

I’ll say this though, I think Trump, if he loses, he still has a shadow. But that shadow lasts one or two years. And he’s got some real strength in that he enjoys the media, he enjoys the public role, and he’s a good communicator. So he’s got some real strengths. But he has some real disadvantages as well, one is he’s not a young man. He’s getting into his mid-70s himself. Two, I think most importantly, he is defined as a loser. And if you ask what Americans disdain, what they dislike the most, they disdain losers. And there’s not anybody running for public office in America today that says I better call up Hillary Clinton and get her advice. They say we’ll give her a speaking slot, and we’ll applaud her, and say “I respect your long service,” but she’s deemed a loser. So if Trump is deemed a loser, I think right away you lose half the party right there. You say “Look your only job was to win this damn thing, you couldn’t do it, so why should we listen to you?”

But there’s also true believers. That saying in the US, you might’ve heard it, that both parties are divided functionally between two groups: the priests and the mathematicians. And the priests say “I have the truth, you need to follow me,” and the mathematicians say “Look I’ve got to get the 50% plus one.” So the mathematicians move away right away from Trump, most of the priests, the Trump priests at least, stay with him and say “He speaks the truth.” But there’s even different priests. It’s a broad church, there’s different factions, different denominations. So there’ll be other people running in 2024, and you could see a series of problems.

One is that the Trump field might be the dominant field, but again there’s no faction mechanism. So what you have are three or four people running as I am the new Trump. I’m the baby Trump, I’m the mini-me. Including, arguably, maybe one of the Trump children running in that capacity. But you have different statewide officials running in that way, so you could have four or five people saying “I’m the new adjusted, modern, improved Donald Trump.” Right? And then you’ll have some people running as non-Trump, or anti-Trump, you’ll have some people running as fusion candidates. I mean, everybody defines themselves. It’s open architecture.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now, by the way, priests and mathematicians, that’s a fantastic quote that … I’m going to be using that live on air, I’m stealing that quote from you. It’s fantastic. Really good. I just wanted to …

Frank Lavin:

If we’re just taking a break, Mike Murphy uses that a lot. So credit him rather than me, at least if you’re going to use it independently. Mike uses that all the time. But it’s …

Misha Zelinsky:

Mike’s been on the show, so I’m sure he won’t mind you borrowing it.

Frank Lavin:

So to hell with him, yeah I agree, I like that.

Misha Zelinsky:

I just want to switch gears slightly, now you had a big career in US politics, you then went on to be an ambassador. I kind of want to get your take on US leadership. The US has typically played a big role as a global leader, I mean, how do you see its role presently? And what’s your take on Trump’s approach to the alliance structures that have underpinned the world, post World War II and certainly post Cold War?

Frank Lavin:

By the way, this process, this evolution I would stay started under Obama. But Trump brings a kind of roughness to it, and Obama had a lot of charm in his style. But both of them came to office questioning US international leadership. And both of them make a lot of similar points, that the cost benefit of US role globally was just out of whack. And we needed to trim down and retrench US outreach, that there wasn’t an immediate threat, that global reach sometimes became a self-defining mission of … we would go on a hunt for enemies and end up in wars where we shouldn’t properly be. And the trade policy … I mean, interesting, Obama ran for President, was the first successful candidate for President to run against trade. And he said almost verbatim, the same as Trump, NAFTA is a mistake and NAFTA needs to be renegotiated.

Now, to his credit, when Obama came to office, backed away from that. And you could say I give him credit for being sort of an economic rationalist, or I give him discredit for being politically expedient. But I guess you could make the same dichotomy as Trump to his discredit, he kept his word. But to his credit, what he said in the campaign is what he did in office. He said “We’re going to try to change NAFTA.” So you had the first time in the modern era, from Harry Truman through George W. Bush, 11 Presidents in a row all supporting trade, trade liberalization, US participation in trade. And you have two Presidents who are saying that trade is harmful to America. We need to back away from it.

But same thing with political military set of issues, you had the sharpest reduction in NATO under Obama that we’d ever had, modern era, and I think Obama was basically saying “Look, we’re saving money, there’s no immediate threat.” And Trump goes one click further on the dial, he says “Look I’m not sure I believe in NATO, I think these other people aren’t burden sharing, and they’re sort of cheating us or abusing the relationship.” So we’re at a period of definition, where the Cold War generation in America has left the scene, and largely left the scene, there’s not a consensus on a US international leadership role, there’s always sort of a populist temptation to argue against playing a role, and I think it’s potentially dangerous. Because to my mind, if we don’t maintain the alliance structure and the international posture we’ve had, you’re going to be inviting to malevolent powers.

There’s a foreign policy concept known as a provocative weakness. And you’ve got to be very careful about reducing your posture to a point where you become a provocative weakness, and you’re provoking instability by not being seen as serious. I don’t think it was any accident that the only change in borders in Europe, by force, since World War II, came with the Russian seizure of Crimea. And that was on Obama’s watch. To say for whatever set of reasons, the Russians, the Soviets, always respected US deterrents. They would challenge and provoke, and do a lot of things, but the battle ground in the Cold War became the third world in part because Europe was so stable. So the only place that was left for the Soviets to compete was Central America, and Angola, and different kind of publics where they could, in some respects, compete on an even footing. But Europe was a very stable environment, where they knew they should not provoke or challenge NATO. And for whatever set of reasons, Obama didn’t have that credibility with the Russians the way other US Presidents did.

Misha Zelinsky:

And so, we’ve talked a lot about partisanship, and we’ve talked about the shift in US policy in recent times. One of the things that seems quite settled, or at least has a bipartisan consensus, is about US competition or strategic competition with China and the Chinese communist party. And so I’m kind of curious for your take, you were Ambassador to Singapore, you live there now, how do you see this playing out in that part of the world? It’s relevant to Australia as well, how do you see this contest, and how do you see it playing out in the region itself?

Frank Lavin:

I think it’s hugely relevant to Australia. Look, I make a broad statement that it is, to my mind, China’s role in the international system is the foreign policy issue of the moment we’re in. This century. China’s the only major power that is still defining its international role. And it’s not entirely up to China itself to define that role, because, to the extent it’s own self-described definition impinges on other people’s rights. Then they have something to say as well. So it’s a collective process, but it’s an ongoing process, and what we see is after 30 years of strong economic performance, China has developed a set of political aspirations, and that economic performance has translated into military reach as well. So they’re in the game, they’re in the competition for power and friends and influence. It’s largely peaceful, but not always, and some of it is quite sharp-elbowed. And they don’t always behave in a way that we would say comports with normal diplomatic behavior. So they’re playing their own tune, and they’re marching to their own beat, and the rest of the world is responding to it.

A lot of this is okay, a lot of this is the normal parameters, and I think what’s important, and where I would fault Trump, I give him marks for calling him out on a lot of their misbehavior, but what he hasn’t done is try to shape some kind of positive view on areas where we can cooperate. On some of the trade issues, tourism, educational activities … there’s a lot of value, and I would say for Australia as well, to have Chinese students there, Chinese tourists, trade … there’s a lot of value in that relationship.

So let’s try to capture the positive sides of the relationship, and let’s be sensitive to the places where there’s competition, like in a text base like Huawei, and so forth where there’s sensitivities and there’s ongoing competition. And then at the more serious level, geopolitics, let’s make sure we draw a line under a very important geopolitical core interest, like freedom of navigation in South China Sea, like Taiwan’s security, where we make sure we’re sending a clear message to China about what US core interests are, and I daresay Australia core interests as well.

Misha Zelinsky:

Given that we basically now have a rising economic power, for the first time in a long time, that is not a Democracy, so how do you see the systems competition reemerging for the first time since the Cold War? Is another Cold War essentially inevitable on that basis?

Frank Lavin:

Yeah, I wouldn’t call it a Cold War but I would call it a competition. And China has never … well, not never. But in the last several decades, China hasn’t claimed to have global ideological goals. They really abandoned those … in the 1970s they were funding groups in Africa and Central America, they funded as we well know, Southeast Asian, Indonesia, and Malay insurgencies. So they’ve played a role in guerrilla warfare, but not for 40 or 50 years. It’s been quite a while since they … so they’re acting in some respects closer to, so to speak, normal state behavior. But, then you have normal geopolitical rivalry and competition, and you observed, the fact that they’re Leninist and political structure is also a cause for concern for other countries. That it’s not what we would call normal state behavior.

But I don’t think it’s a cold war competition, I don’t think they’re trying to get African countries to model themselves after China the way the Soviet Union wanted African countries to adopt Soviet-style government. What they do want from African countries is political support, they want markets, they want technology embedded in the ecosystem in Africa. So there’s certain things they want, but it’s more power projection and economic connectivity than political modeling in the strict Soviet sense of that word.

Misha Zelinsky:

Getting towards the end here, but I want to quickly jump back to the US election. Kind of curious for your take, what would your advice be to Republicans that are worried about Trump, that have been lifelong Republicans, what is their role in this election? Do they vote Democrat? Do they sit it out? Would they split ticket? And then secondly, who’s going to win? I’ll barrel you down to a prediction here.

Frank Lavin:

Well look, I think there’s an aspect of human behavior regardless of ideology, regardless of policy, there’s some aspect of human behavior that any one of us would say “This type of behavior is so reprehensible that even if I find myself in agreement with the individual in some respects, I can’t in good conscience vote for this person because of his own activity.” And that’s my feeling toward Donald Trump, that even though I probably agree with elements of his platform and things he’s done, I just don’t think he should be President.

But I’m giving you a bit of a long answer there, because I back into that to say “Look, I’m comfortable with right of center policies elsewhere on the Republican ticket.” So I don’t have a problem voting for Republican office holders and Republican candidates elsewhere. I know some of my colleagues who are never-Trumpers who don’t adhere to that, and they say “Not only must we purge Trump, but we must purge anybody who supported Trump, anybody who voted with Trump,” and so there’s got to be a broad church. We need a Robespierre kind of reaction.

But I don’t subscribe to that, and I’ll tell you this, whether Biden wins or loses, if he wins he’s going to want a Republican Senate in there to put a bit of a check on his own left, and he’ll be a more successful President if a Republican Senate is in there. And I also think Republicans, if they were looking at a post-Trump Republican party, a Republican Senate will help them develop an identity beyond Trump, and there’ll be speakers and leaders politically who are not Donald Trump.

So I’m not abashed at all about saying I’m voting … I think, I just applied for my absentee ballot, I vote in Ohio, but I think … I’m just trying to remember … I think I’ll be voting straight Republican for state and local offices in Ohio. There’s always one outlier, one lunatic that you don’t feel comfortable voting for, but I’ll be voting for somewhere around 99 to 100% of Republicans. But not Donald Trump.

Misha Zelinsky:

And the predication for the Presidential race is?

Frank Lavin:

I think Biden wins. I think Trump’s got three big problems, only one of which might have a solution. The three big problems are: the economy, Coronavirus, and Trump’s own personality. Trump has been unpopular, more disliked than liked, about since he took office. And you can’t fix that. That’s his operating style, he relishes it, he likes being audacious, he likes playing the public role, he likes being the bad guy, it lets him be the most visible person in the room. It lets him be the most powerful person in the room. So that’s the price I pay, for my operating style. So that’s just uninviting to people. The Coronavirus, I don’t see any measurable improvement, although Trump will try to message some improvements. But I don’t see that having traction.

The one area where Trump can pick up a little bit is the economy is on a bit of an uptick. So he’ll get some credit for that. But the main problem with that thesis is it’s only on an uptick in a relative sense, in an absolute sense it’s still off-peak from pre-Coronavirus. So if you ask me how that washes out, it means that people who are inclined to vote for Trump but found all of the last six months too timultuous, they’ll gravitate back to Trump. He’ll pick up a point or two. But people who are disinclined to vote for him aren’t going to be won over because we have two or three months of a nice recovery. Because we’re still under water, we’re still below where we were before Coronavirus started. So I do think Biden wins.

I’ll give you one other prediction if I might, Misha, that all this discussion about election day anomalies, and weird behavior and Trump’s weird behavior … there’s no question at all that he loves being outrageous, he loves being provocative, he loves saying inappropriate things. But I have a feeling this is going to be a reasonably smooth election day, meaning by midnight election night, US time, we’ll know 75% of the results. And we’ll be able to make a prediction. Unless the results are say, less than two or three percent, then it’s harder to do because it breaks down by states, of course. But if Biden’s up there in a three or four percent lead, where I think he’s going to be, I think we’ll know … we’ll be congratulating him that night.

Although, as I suggested a minute ago, Trump is still of the kind of personality that he’ll be defiant, if not on the bridge of his ship screaming at the torpedoes. So he still has the capacity to behave in an un-statesmanlike fashion, but I’ve just got a sense this has a smoother resolution than you might expect, given all the discussion we’re hearing today about anomalies on election day.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, a lot of people are worried about the mail-in ballot issue, and the fact that most … if you look at the messaging and the polling, that Biden’s voters are going to vote by mail, Trump’s voters are going to vote in person, and the nightmare scenario is that Trump’s in the lead on the night of the election and then the postal ballots come in over the next few days and then Trump declares that it’s been stolen from him. So that’s the nightmare.

Frank Lavin:

Elements of that could happen, I guess what I’m saying is I think 75% of the states, that scenario won’t apply. That the amount of mail in ballots are small enough, and the lead is large enough. Or the counting is taking place quickly enough, that even by election night you say, Biden wins Pennsylvania by 400,000 votes, there’s still 150,000 votes to be counted, and people say well that doesn’t matter. It’s not consequential. So I think that will be about 75% of the states, that election night will say that it’s over. But that leaves a lot that are closer to your scenario, but even in most of those where we say “We don’t really know, we can’t really declare a winner, but we could say if trends continue this person’s won or that person’s won.” But we can’t formally state it.

So I think that will be the bulk … only in the minority of that minority will you say, “We don’t know who’s winning, and the trends aren’t clear either.” So we don’t really know, we just have to keep counting for another few days. But that is going to be a very small number of states where that even materializes. So I guess I’m prognosticating here that it won’t be enough, it won’t be big enough states or consequential enough states that it’s going to be meaningful, right?

Misha Zelinsky:

Do you have any concerns about Trump and the Republican Senate in a lame duck session, Trump’s lost the election, Biden’s not yet been sworn in, in January, the Republican Senate potentially ramming through a supreme court nomination? Or other things of that nature? Or is that something that’s overblown?

Frank Lavin:

I think they’re going to be as forceful as they can, I mean Andy Warhol once said “Art is whatever you can get away with,” but I would say politics is whatever you can get away with. So I would say yeah, whatever they can legally get away with, and you can criticize their audacity and you can take umbrage at their behavior, but to say if the system lets them do this, they’re going to do it. Or they’re going to try to do it. The big, big prize that we’re looking at right now is the Supreme Court Justice.

But I also think we have to give this individual some credit, meaning I think America will more or less accept this process if the person themselves with judicial knowledge and learned behavior, and dignity. And the person comes across like a judge. And I think the person will have a big TV audience. You’ll have 50 or 100 million people watching this person’s testimony, and they’ll come to a conclusion to say the person looks okay to me. So Democrats are against this person only because it’s a Republican selection, but I think then the issue will just fade. But if the person comes across like a boob, some kind of political hack, they’re not up to the job or otherwise flawed, then I think it raises all of the points you just made to say “Look, this is a force.” You’re using this temporary majority status to push somebody through. And it’s going to rank a lot, I think Republicans pay a price for that kind of ham-handedness.

Misha Zelinsky:

Well we can talk about this, clearly I could talk about this all day. But you’ve got other things to do. Now I’ve got the last question that I don’t let any guests leave without getting weighed in on, I know you’ve been desperately researching Australians, but a barbecue at your place, it could be in Ohio or it could be in Singapore, Singapore is probably not as far for Australians to travel. There’s a lot of Aussies in Singapore. But three Aussies at a barbecue at Frank’s, and why?

Frank Lavin:

The three I’d invite … yeah, I’ve been thinking about this. And I have to ask you a technical question, since you’re the judge and jury here, can we designate pre-confederation inhabitants as Aussies?

Misha Zelinsky:

Sure.

Frank Lavin:

Or are you going strictly by … yeah. Because then I’ll say, there’s an interesting historical figure who has an Australian pedigree and Australia anchor, but I suspect Australians would deny he’s Australian, but he’s a fascinating historical figure, and this is your former governor of New South Wales, from the Colonial era, Captain Bligh.

Misha Zelinsky:

Right, yeah.

Frank Lavin:

I would put William Bligh down as a fascinating individual. This fellow, we in America know him only from Mutiny on the Bounty, and the fact that he has this rather remarkable escape across several thousand miles of sea. But I think what few Americans know is then he becomes … he re-enters the Colonial service and becomes the Governor of New South Wales, and there’s a mutiny again! There’s another mutiny against him and he’s kicked out again.

Misha Zelinsky:

Rum rebellion, yeah.

Frank Lavin:

I would definitely want to ask him, what is there about his management style and his personality that induces people to mutiny against him. And I think Misha, I’m going to ask you to chip in with me on that, and I think what we’ve got to get him is Dale Carnegie’s book about how to win friends and influence people, to say “But Captain, you’ve just got to work on that personality side, so you’re not rubbing folks the wrong way all day long.” But I would put Captain Bligh down on there.

I thought of somebody else, but I’m not even sure I know their names, but this might be two [and might not fit under your rules, but I was also intrigued … you know, I was in Perth a few months ago, and I got to go to the Fremantle, there’s a shipping museum there. And the exhibit on the Batavia, was the Batavia shipwreck, but these were the first Europeans … two of the mutineers from the Batavia were juts set ashore on Australia …

Misha Zelinsky:

East India Company, wasn’t it? Yeah.

Frank Lavin:

Yeah, that’s the Dutch though, so it’s not even the Brits. So it’d be quite a stretch to call these people Aussies, since Australia didn’t exist, nothing existed, they were just put ashore as part of their punishment and they disappeared. But it’s nonetheless an interesting story. But I’d say back to planet Earth, the real Australia as we know it, I’d say … I’ve always had this curiosity about a prominent Australian who played a signature role in his country’s history, but Americans only know him through the prism of World War II, and that’s John Curtin. But what’s striking to me, is that if we look at global leadership in that moment, and I would put Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle … and I’d put Mackenzie King in that as well, to say these are individuals who we know today as great wartime leaders, and indeed they were very important for their nations’ survival. But their record domestically, and their record in domestic politics was much more mixed. Much more ambiguous, and much harder to evaluate.

And I think as Americans, who are just a bit lazy on this point, but we don’t fully understand Curtin’s parliamentary pedigree and what his domestic agenda is, because I think as far as we’re concerned, we’re just so overwhelmed by war dynamics that we’d say, as far as the US is concerned it really doesn’t matter what he was doing back home. What really matters is the A, B, C, D alliance in East Asia, and what the Americans, they’re all just working together.

But that would be the fellow. So Captain Bligh and John Curtin. And then I want to take a flyer, there’s an enormous celebrity culture in Australia, and I wanted to take a bow to it, but to go with someone who might not be terribly well known at the moment, but I suspect will be, and it’s a young Australian filmmaker, Natalie James. And she just had a movie out, which got released in the US called “Relic.” And it’s a bit of a spooky, a bit of a horror movie. And so she’s making a name for herself. I heard her on a podcast, very impressive person. And it’s a degree of creativity, entrepreneurial drive, craftsmanship, that you really have to respect. And I think when people say “What makes Australia great?” It’s people like that, who have a vision and pursue a vision. And so it’s not because of celebrity status, I don’t think she necessarily has celebrity status, but because she’s going down this path of professional excellence and creativity, and she brings joy to our lives with her movies.

Misha Zelinsky:

I’m going to say, look, I am the judge and jury, and that is without a doubt the best answer that we’ve ever had on this show. The amount of history that you’ve got on there with William Bligh, the Rum Rebellion, the Dutch East India Company crash in the 17th century at Perth, John Curtin, legendary labor party minister from World War II, and then a modern day filmmaker, Natalie James, mate. Five-star effort, well done!

Frank Lavin:

Thanks Misha! Am I the only American who didn’t say Ned Kelly?

Misha Zelinsky:

Well you didn’t say Crocodile Dundee or Ned Kelly.

Frank Lavin:

I didn’t say Paul Hogan.

Misha Zelinsky:

You lost a Bingo round, mate, but nevertheless. Five star effort. Look, we’ll have to leave it there. Thank you so much for coming on, and I will hope to have you on sometime soon.

Frank Lavin:

I’d love to visit with you again. Thank you so much, Misha, for having me on.

Misha Zelinsky:

Thanks mate.

Frank Lavin:

Thanks

Eric Schultz: Hope v Fear? Obama, Authenticity and Election 2020

Eric Schultz, is the founder of the Schultz Group and is currently a senior advisor to former President Barack Obama. He served in the White House as the Principal Deputy Press Secretary and Special Assistant to the president. 

Recognized by Politico as the strategist “White House officials turn to in a crisis to handle communications,” Schultz advised the president, spoke on behalf of the Administration on Air Force One and in the White House briefing room, and helped manage the Administration’s proactive messaging and news-of-the-day responses. 

Schultz is a veteran of numerous statewide and national campaigns. Before joining the White House, Schultz served as communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, where he became “well-known among Washington reporters for his aggressive, behind-the-scenes approach,” as noted by Politico. Schultz spent several years on Capitol Hill working for key U.S. senators, including now Democratic Leader Charles Schumer. Schultz, who most recently advised Netflix’s reboot of Designated Survivor, currently provides strategic communications guidance to clients in the political, financial, technology and entertainment sectors.

Misha Zelinsky aught up with Eric for a chinwag about life in the Obama White House, how to manage a crisis, the three secret words of communications, what the Situation Room is actually like, Election 2020, why politicians must be authentic, whether Hope beats Fear and what Obama is really like off camera.

It’s a really fun chat and we hope you enjoy it. Eric is super generous with his time.

If you’re enjoying the show, jump on twitter and instagram @mishazelinsky @diplomatesshow and let us know what you think. Plenty of you are heckling us there already; and we are happy to dive deeper into things we chat about.

Also 5 star reviews are appreciated. They game the algorithm and help push us above Putin. 

 

TRANSCRIPT

Misha Zelinsky:

Eric Schultz, welcome to Diplomates. Thanks for joining us, mate.

Eric Schultz:

Thank you. Great to be here.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now as ever, there’s so many places to start with someone who’s had such a big career like yourself. But given we’re heading into election season, I thought I might take you back in time just quickly. Back to 2016, the night of the last presidential election. How surprised, I suppose, were you at this result? And what were your feelings on the night?

Eric Schultz:

Yeah. When I agreed to do this conversation, I wasn’t sure we had to relive that night. But I’m happy to indulge. The question is, was I surprised? And yes, absolutely. I don’t think stunned, flabbergasted, bowled over do it justice. I think that all of us in the country, but also in the White House, were anticipating that Secretary Clinton was going to prevail on election night. So to say we were stunned is a bit of an understatement.

Eric Schultz:

But I will say that President Obama gathered all of us the next morning, Wednesday morning, as many of us trudged into work having stayed up the entire night and were exhausted and emotionally drained and empty inside and a whole whirlwind of emotions and thoughts going through our head. He was the one who called us into the Oval Office early that Wednesday morning and said, “Look, the story line of history is that it zigs and it zags, and it doesn’t always go in a straight direction.” And that as public servants, and as the keepers of democracy at that moment, our job was to follow through with a peaceful transition of power. He wanted to send a signal that morning that the sun is going to rise and that the foundations of our country and the values and the democratic small-D institutions that we have are strong enough to withstand any particular, any singular election result.

Eric Schultz:

And so it was under his direction that we sent that message loudly and clearly on Wednesday morning, and then spent the next two or three months providing for a real peaceful transition of power. And that meant, at the principle level, in terms of President Obama and president-elect Trump, convening. But down to the staff level, making sure that his team knew as much as possible going into this, when you land a new job in a new building in a new weird place, that they had as much knowledge and support on the front end of that as possible. And I certainly communicated with my counterpart who was going to replace me, and I said, “Look,” we met once. I can’t remember if that was December or January, or November. But I said, “Look, I’m happy to be available to you. We can meet in private, we can meet in public, we can email, talk. Whatever you want to do.” And that was based on the directive from the President to be as helpful as possible to the incoming team.

Misha Zelinsky:

We will talk probably a little bit about the Trump White House. I’d like to talk about your time in the Obama White House. You were in a position advising him on communications. First, I suppose, it’s a position of high levels of trust. How did you earn President Obama’s trust? And then how were you able to, I suppose, advise him around his expectations of his comms team?

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, so I started in the White House in the spring of 2011, which is when Republicans had taken over the House of Representatives, one chamber of the US Congress. And they vowed all of this congressional oversight into the administration, a whole bunch of investigations. And the White House smartly decided to hire a bunch of outside people to help manage the response to those investigations. So I hired mostly lawyers, but some researchers, some communications people. And so, for my early years in the White House, that was the scope of my portfolio was managing the response to those investigations.

Eric Schultz:

My purview broadened from there. And then when Jay Carney left and Josh Earnest became the Press Secretary in 2014, he asked me to be his deputy. And I tell people it’s a little bit like being… I usually say Miss America runner-up, right? When Josh couldn’t perform his duties, they roll me out and I’d try to do the best job that I could. And it was really from that perch where I developed a relationship with President Obama. And the truth of the matter is, a lot of that relationship was nourished playing cards with the President. Just on long trips, what he does to clear his mind, to just relax, is to play cards. And so we, on a lot of plane rides-

Misha Zelinsky:

What was the game?

Eric Schultz:

Spades. And I was terrible, and he is super competitive, but he’s also mentoring. And so as a cruel joke, I was on his team, which is the worst case scenario because he’s dependent on you. And so not only is he competitive, he’s thankfully very forgiving. And so that’s where we developed a personal relationship.

Eric Schultz:

And then obviously in the middle of these trips, there’s a lot of communications and messaging judgment calls and conversations we would have in order for him to, again, learn to trust me. I did not work on the President’s 2008 campaign, so I was not part of that team that worked with him to get to the White House. So I consider myself very lucky that, even as an outsider, I was able to develop a relationship with him.

Misha Zelinsky:

What are some of your best and worst moments in the White House then? Given that you’ve sort of clearly had a good relationship with the President, I imagine it wasn’t always all sunshine and rainbows, it’s a tough environment, it’s a high pressure, high stakes environment.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah. I don’t know if this made international headlines, but the President’s signature domestic legislative accomplishment in the first term was universal healthcare, what we call the Affordable Care Act, which later became known as Obamacare. And this is something that, again, presidents I think dating back to Teddy Roosevelt had tried to do and tried to get done and President Obama got this done in 2009 in his first year in office. And it was a very complicated piece of business, but it required sort of transforming… I think one sixth of the US economy is healthcare based. And so it was going to be moving a lot of different pieces.

Eric Schultz:

We had until 2014 to prepare to implement it and over the course of those years that meant putting pen to paper and getting all of the infrastructure in place. And we, again, given that it was the President’s signature domestic accomplishment, we wanted to make sure nothing could go wrong. But it was going to require a whole bunch of buy-in and support from everyone under the sun. The hospitals, the drug makers, patients, healthcare providers, insurers, politicians, civic leaders, businesses. Everyone under the sun sort of had to be bought into this in order to make it work. And we put in a lot of years of work to get ready for the launch. And, again I don’t know if this was an international affair, but we did launch and everything that we put into it didn’t work because the website flopped.

Misha Zelinsky:

I’d like to say that we didn’t hear about that, mate, but unfortunately as you’re telling that story I was saying, “I hope this isn’t about the website.”

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, this is about the website. You asked for my worst time in the White House and it was 100% the healthcare.gov flailing.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, that couldn’t have been a fun time. But sorry, keep going.

Eric Schultz:

It was terrible. And to the President’s credit, he understood that this wasn’t a communications problem, this was just a problem. And he understood that until the website got fixed the breathless, non-stop, around the clock coverage of this failure wasn’t going to change. And so, again, we stood up a task force and surged our Department of Health and Human Services with resources and Silicon Valley experts and a whole bunch of assets to sort of redo that website and get it up and running as soon as humanly possible.

Eric Schultz:

As a communicator it’s a story about… I don’t want to say damage control because there wasn’t really a way to control that damage, but in terms of being open and transparent with reporters and the country about what we were doing to fix the problem and I think we had something like a weekly, or maybe even more frequent than that, conference call where we would talk through in a very technical level what specifications we were fixing that day, what our estimates were for people being able to get through and sign up. Eventually we got a website that worked and a program that insured 20 million new Americans.

Misha Zelinsky:

You’re someone that goes and stands at the lectern, or did, in terms of preparation that goes into something like that, how difficult is it to get totally across all the information that you got to have, be briefed on, but then you are briefing the media on? I mean, it’s an extraordinarily challenging task for one person to do. Maybe give us a sense of that.

Eric Schultz:

Right. So this is one of those that I can only speak to my experience in the Obama White House, and others may judge it as a contrast with our current White House, but-

Misha Zelinsky:

Slightly

Eric Schultz:

Yeah. My understanding is that our processes track closely our predecessors, so the Bush administration, the Clinton administration. And essentially, when the press secretary speaks from the podium we’re not just shooting from the hip. The reason we go out with a thick binder of talking points and guidance is because we understand that we are speaking for not just president, but for the United States of America on the world stage.

Eric Schultz:

And I think that in politics a lot of us get ridiculed for being so careful in our language and there’s political speak and we can get sort of mocked for being very generic or very vague. But the reason we do that is important. When you’re speaking for the White House your words carry enormous weight and you can move stock markets, you can alienate allies, you can mobilize armies, you can annoy your friends. So what we try to do is make sure that when Josh or myself or Robert gives, or Jay Carney, whoever was speaking for the administration on any given day, was fully prepared with guidance that represented the 360 degree viewpoint of the US government.

Eric Schultz:

And so sometimes that’s complicated. Sometimes if we’re talking about the Iran nuclear negotiations that is a process that involves the state departments, Secretary Kerry was the lead negotiator, that involves the department of energy, the department of interior, that involves our office of legislative affairs to make sure congress is looped, our office of public engagement to make sure some of the climate and energy activists are comfortable with what we’re saying, that includes our White House councils office to make sure that legally we’re in the right lanes.

Eric Schultz:

So when we speak, again it wasn’t just what the press people want to say, it’s language that we know has to be carefully vetted throughout all the different components of the administration.

Misha Zelinsky:

That’s an extraordinary difficult challenge. You can understand why it does sometimes sound a little, for lack of a better word, nuanced or more like a UN resolution.

Eric Schultz:

Yes.

Misha Zelinsky:

The current president, he watches press conferences very closely of his press secretaries. Was there ever a moment where you got off and thought, “Well, that’s it. I’m fired. This went that badly. I really hope I don’t see the president in the next 24 hours.”?

Eric Schultz:

Thank goodness, no. And that’s not to say I don’t make mistakes, I make plenty. But the three hardest words I had to learn when briefing the press were, “I don’t know.” And that is not an instinct that comes naturally. You sort of want to flub your way through and find some space to give an answer. But I think at the end of the day, reporters will respect you more if you’re willing to acknowledge that you don’t have the answer at your fingertips and you’ll follow up with them and get them the best answer you can.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, I think that’s a really good lesson. In terms of, you’ve talked about all the things going on, what’s one of the biggest crises you dealt with at the White House and how do you go about communicating that? And I suppose as a comms specialist, what are the key principles of crisis communications? Because a lot of people in politics listen to this show, big audience in political circles. I heard everyone lean in a little as I said that. I’m kind of curious for your take.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah. I was thinking about this question and I was thinking back to the G20 summit in 2016 in Hangzhou, China and this was sort of at the end of the presidency and it was a moment where we were trying to sort of wrap up and make some sort of endgame progress on a lot of the president’s priorities. And I think we had negotiated a pretty strong deal with President Xi on greenhouse gas emissions, we had made some progress on cyber, on a whole host of other issues, at the time dealing with Syria and dealing with refugees were both very hot ticket items and President Obama had worked closely with a bunch of other foreign leaders to make progress on those issues. But the thing that dominated the coverage of that G20 was that the Chinese officials at the airport used the wrong stairs for when President Obama descended the aircraft. And this was something that dominated three or four days worth of coverage back here in the United States.

Misha Zelinsky:

Big issue.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, exactly. It was read as this big Chinese snub of the American president and a veracious appetite to cover the optics of the stairs versus the actual substance of what we were trying to accomplish on the ground as part of the summit. As much as we could cajole reporters into focusing on issues that actually mattered and not the circumstances which surrounded which staircase the president used to descend the aircraft on arriving in China, we had mixed success.

Eric Schultz:

And eventually, at one of the press briefings they asked President Obama about it and he said, “Look, I wouldn’t over-crank this. The truth is,” I remember this, “There was a mix-up at the airport, it was a smaller airport, and they just didn’t have the right driver of the right stairs,” so it was a very technical staffing bureaucratic stuff. But again, it got ballooned into this international affair of outsized proportion. And again, we just tried our best to focus reporters on substance and what work was actually unfolding on the ground, as opposed to that sort of stuff.

Misha Zelinsky:

It must be frustrating though, right? Trying to get people to focus on the substance rather than the triviality. I mean, that’s a bigger problem that no single press secretary’s going to solve on their own. But in terms of broadening out a little bit more to just generally politics and good communication, what do you think the biggest mistakes you observe people trying to communicate in noisy environments and what’s the best way to cut through in that sense?

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, I think that’s a profound question. It’s sort of the biggest challenge we face. In the White House we had a saying that our strategy was to find audiences where they are at and that was sort of our guiding principle. So I’ll give you a few examples.

Eric Schultz:

When the United States was negotiating the Paris climate accord in 2015 we wanted a way to sell this to the American public in a way that was outside the typical political conversation. The president went to visit the Arctic, he was a first sitting president to visit the Arctic and we didn’t at the time when developing a media strategy, we decided we weren’t going to sit down with 60 Minutes or the Washington Post or New York Times, we sat down with Bear Grylls. Who I don’t know if you all know, he’s an outdoorsman, he’s got a couple of shows.

Misha Zelinsky:

Kind of like Steve Irwin was, right?

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. An outdoorsman who thrives in natural environments. And we wanted to be able to breakthrough to an audience that, again, doesn’t follow the day to day of the Paris negotiations or what’s happening in the house subcommittee on interior, but rather just appreciates clean air, clean water, wants their kids to grow up in a world that’s healthy.

Eric Schultz:

And so we did an hour long primetime special with Bear Grylls where President Obama and him, it was a beautiful set, where they sort of wandered outside and I think they caught raw fish with their bare hands and all that stuff. And it was a really nice setting in order to, again, just breakthrough what we were doing, why we were doing it, but to an audience that wasn’t necessarily attuned to the politics.

Misha Zelinsky:

It is hard. It’s increasingly hard to find new audiences, right? People are very much in their bubbles. It is hard to cut through to people that aren’t just probably like you or I, or listeners to this podcast, addicts to the political news cycle, so it is challenging. That’s an interesting way that you guys did it.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now, just switching up to 2020 or at least to present day. One of the things I’m actually curious about before we talk about the election and President Trump more generally, you’re still advising President Obama, he intervenes very rarely I suppose into politics, like most former presidents. How do you make an assessment when that should be, on which topic, in which way? Because former president’s words carry a particular weight, particularly the predecessor, and I think particularly when you consider the relationship between the current president and the former president.

Eric Schultz:

Yup. That’s a great question. I think much like many chapters of President Obama’s public life, this is the first post-presidency of its kind. I don’t think any other former US president has had to face what President Obama has. And look, the truth is President Obama believes deeply in this American principle of one president at a time. He believes that for a couple of reasons. One is, he’s mindful and respectful and grateful for the latitude that his predecessor gave to him while he was serving in office. And again, that was after a 2008 presidential campaign where President Obama was quite aggressive towards President Bush and his policies.

Eric Schultz:

But mostly it is because President Obama believes that in order for the democratic party here in the US to move on, that the next generation of leaders need to step up. And that if he gets outsized attention for when he speaks out and if he is always soaking up the limelight and soaking up the oxygen, that really limits the ability for the next wave of leaders to step up and take hold. And he’s been very careful to makes sure that he will speak out when he feels American values are threatened, and we have on a whole host of issues. But in the whole, he wants to make sure that the next wave of democratic leaders is able to command the spotlight and grow into their roles as national leaders.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah. It must be very difficult at times to bite his tongue given, it seems, he’s got an administration that wants to bait him at every opportunity. If not at the podium, via Twitter or other challenges, and then also you got a very noisy media environment in the conservative media space.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now, on a personal level, as someone that’s been behind the press podium, what goes through your head when you’ve watched the press briefings throughout the duration of the Trump administration thus far? Do you ever feel a little bit sorry for the person at the time? Like they go up there and take a beating. You’re shaking your head for those watching at home.

Eric Schultz:

No. I mean, look, because I still work for President Obama I’m sort of constrained in how much I can talk about the current administration. I will say though, that for me, I do get this a lot, which is, “How can you stand to watch the press briefings?” Like, how can you stand to watch the press briefing? It’s pretty cringe-worthy for anyone. I will just say as a top line that credibility matters and it doesn’t just matter I think it’s everything.

Eric Schultz:

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of combative conversations and exchanges I had with reporters and we always put our best spin on the ball and aggressively made our strongest argument and wanted to make sure that that was presented to the press. But, and I think reporters would back us up, we never knowingly lied. We never knowingly mislead anyone. And if we did, it was sort of an errant one-off mistake that we owned up to.

Eric Schultz:

And so I just think as a communicator, again whether you’re representing the president of the United States, a foreign leader, a state senator, a member of congress, a business leader, whoever, that you have to be straight with people. I mean, it’s probably a good personal rule of thumb even if you’re not a communicator. But that once you undermine your own credibility it is virtually impossible to regain it. We’re going through a few new cycles here where the White House is having to contend with other anonymous sources and other reports and other things where if they had had credibility over the past four years, they’d have more standing to make effective arguments and to be more persuasive. But because there’s sort of a pattern of not telling the truth, they are in a weaker position to make their case.

Eric Schultz:

That’s my biggest takeaway. And again, it doesn’t just pertain to the White House. I think whenever you’re speaking for someone or a company or a group or a candidate or a public official, whatever, that if the person on the other side of the conversation doesn’t believe that you’re telling the truth, then you’re not doing your job.

Misha Zelinsky:

That’s a really well-made point. I think that’s exactly right. You can say whatever you want, but if there’s zero credibility behind it, it makes it very difficult to spin. Though it is hard to spin, I imagine, 18 separate recordings of interviews with Bob Woodward. There’s only so much one can spin on that. Were you shocked that the president had given 18 on the record interviews to the person that took down Nixon?

Eric Schultz:

There’s a funny rule of thumb in Washington, the only thing worse than not engaging Bob Woodward when working on a book is engaging Bob Woodward when he’s working on a book.

Misha Zelinsky:

Well, I guess President Trump’s about to find that out. Because there was fear where they didn’t engage and now there’s rage where they have engaged

Eric Schultz:

Look, I don’t want to comment on their strategy. We had plenty of critical books written about President Obama and sometimes they are hard to navigate. Reporters are not novices, they know how to start from the outside, people who might be less informed and work their way up. And so we had to navigate plenty of books, plenty of them were not particularly complimentary about President Obama.

Eric Schultz:

I think Woodward is obviously one of the legendary journalists of our time, but given the track record of this White House in contravening their own comments, that he was very shrewd to get tapes.

Misha Zelinsky:

Indeed. Now switching up to, we are I’m not sure how many days out, not a great number of days out, probably 50 days out from the election. What’s your take on this years election? What can we expect? This is probably going to be a wild ride. I mean, clearly most of us in the game, and I’ve said this on this podcast before, I was horrendously wrong on 2016 and the outcome. What’s your take on it thus far on the matchup between former Vice President Biden and President Trump?

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, your caveats well taken. I think we were all tremendously wrong about 2016, so take that for what it’s worth, audience. But look, I think President Trump has tremendous advantages on his side, but he’s got a lot of crosswinds too. Our country’s suffering from a health pandemic that in many other corners of the world has been much better managed and other racial injustice challenges that he has not calmed but rather has stoked and an economy that is in a really challenging spot. And so it’s up to Vice President Biden to make the case that he can get us to a better path. I think that a lot of the data suggests that people are clamoring for precisely Vice President Biden’s message of unifying the country and bringing us together and restoring basic competency back to the administration.

Eric Schultz:

And so I think you’re right, I think it’s going to be a dog fight for the next 50 days. Both of our conventions, the Republican and Democratic Conventions, are now over. And so obviously Vice President Biden has selected his running mate, so the next three big moments for our domestic political calendar are the three debates. And so President Trump and Vice President Biden will face off in three debates. The first one is at the end of September, and then the two others are in October. And so those will be big moments that get a lot of attention.

Eric Schultz:

But other than that, there’s just a lot of back and forth between the two camps. But I think that clearly in our primary process and now in our general election there is a yearning for a return to steady, strong, capable leadership. The type of vision that people associate with Vice President Biden. Vice President Biden’s been around for a long time. He obviously was President Obama’s Vice President for eight years, but before that served in the senate for a while and he’s a known commodity. People know his story, they respect him, they know that he’s a good, decent public servant, in it for the right reasons.

Eric Schultz:

Like a lot of voters in Australia people aren’t necessarily digging into the white papers and all the policy sheets, but they’re going to vote based on their values and if they feel that Vice President Biden animates them and is consistent with the character and principle of what they want to see in the White House. And I think he’s going to win.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now, you’re a messaging guy, you work for one of the most legendary presidents who ran on a positive message, a hope message, and you’ve got a president now who very much prosecutes the antithesis of that. It’s a fear message. In this election now, does hope beat fear or does fear beat hope? Because both candidates are painting very different, you look at the way the conventions went, they’re painting very different… Your point about competency I think is well-made. I think people certainly are yearning for that. But how do you see that messaging battle playing out? And which one typically wins in your assessment?

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, it’s a great question and since I still work for President Obama I’m going to be an optimist.

Misha Zelinsky:

I wouldn’t expect otherwise.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our country’s going through a very painful time and there is protest, there is unrest, there’s unimaginable death and pain and sickness and illness, and there’s job loss, there’s rising poverty. And I think that people really are hungry for a better path and I think that Vice President Biden has been very precise in how he’s presented his alternative to the current scenario and that if people want to go back to a basic approach where government is on your side and just trying to make things better, we don’t have all the solutions and we’re not going to be able to snap our fingers to get out of this, but that we return to a government that respects the rule of law, respects the freedom of the press, respects scientists, respects democratic institutions.

Eric Schultz:

I think that is why the Vice President gained traction in the primary and that’s why I think he’s doing well right now. I don’t think that people want more of the same chaos and division and fear that President Trump stokes and that’s why I’m optimistic.

Misha Zelinsky:

You mentioned you’re still working for President Obama, so noting that you’re still on the payroll we might have to discount this answer slightly, I thought maybe you might just give us a sense, a lot of us we watch people on TV, you make an assessment of what sort of person they are. I think current president you get a pretty good sense of what sort of person he is. I always thought as well with President Obama that he would be very similar to the way he presented in public, in long form interviews et cetera, he seemed like, frankly, a pretty cool guy. Can you maybe give us… And I’m sure he’s listening to this and so obviously you’ll need to catch your remarks, mate. But maybe if you could just give us a little bit of insight there if you mind.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, the bummer is you’re right, I am still on the payroll so I get paid to say this, but it is the truth. Which is the guy you have seen on the world stage for the past 10 or 12 years is the guy I talk to in person. He’s as worldly and as smart as you’d think, but just as down to earth as you’d hope. And I don’t think that’s an accident. In other words, I think that we now live in a media environment that you have a real intimacy with your public officials. This isn’t a time where politics are happening distantly and you watch the news at 6:30 at night and get a report. You are constantly in their space, they are in your space.

Eric Schultz:

And the reason why President Obama was so successful and effective is because there was an authenticity to him and that voters have a really good whiff that if you’re being fake that’s a red flag. And I think that is a newer phenomenon that you could sort of get away with a façade or a public persona that’s different than who you are personally. But I don’t know that works anymore. And so I think that that’s largely one of the reasons why he’s been so successful is he is who he is.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. It’s very difficult to survive the glare of so many cameras and social media and the consistent cut through. Now, you talked about things being as they are, you’re the consultant on the hit TV show Designated Survivor-

Eric Schultz:

Yes!

Misha Zelinsky:

[crosstalk 00:37:13] your comments you talked about the fact that Hollywood’s portrayal of the White House is not what it’s like to work there in terms of its salubriousness or otherwise. Maybe you could just quickly give us a rundown of that, mate.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, I worked on the show Designated Survivor for the third season, Netflix rebooted it, and it was a blast to work on. It was an experience for me because you had a bunch of writers out in Los Angeles who have never, I mean I’m sure some of them have been to Washington, but none of them had worked in government and most of them had not been inside the White House. So they’re writing 60 minutes worth of content about a setting and environment they’d never been in.

Eric Schultz:

And so it was a great opportunity for me to walk them through what’s realistic inside the White House. And again, not all of my suggestions were taken, but it was a fun moment to connect what they wanted their Hollywood storyline to still have some realism. And yeah, the pictures of the situation room that people hear a lot about are much more glamorous than what they actually are, which is sort of a couple of cavernous conference rooms with some wall clocks and TV screens that have telecommunications capabilities.

Misha Zelinsky:

Careful, mate, Putin might be listening. You don’t want to give the game away.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, I know. I know, I know. One of the storylines that the writers did like was we had problems with mice pretty frequently and in order to address the problem with mice it wasn’t just one phone call, it was sort of a bureaucratic process of our general services administration and who can call who and get what apparatus over the building to address the very acute problem that there’s rodents at my feet. So as writers they had fun with that. But yeah, I think that how Hollywood portrays Washington, it’s obviously fun entertainment, but I do think this is how a lot of people get their information and a lot of people’s understanding of government, the White House, how Washington works, is often derived from popular culture.

Misha Zelinsky:

Well, there’s one final question before you go now. Typically, because we’re a heavy foreign policy show, it’s very difficult to get in anything approaching a non-clumsy segue, but we are talking about mice and rodents in the White House so it’s a little bit easier to switch up to barbecues at Eric’s place. Now, you are an American guest so you have to have three Australians. We’ve already mentioned Steve Irwin so he’s out, but three Aussies to barbecue at Eric’s and why?

Eric Schultz:

I know, so I was planning to do a lot of homework to research this question of authors, civic leaders, Aussies who have been impressive on the world stage. I did none of that homework. One of my dreams is to come to the Australian Open so I was looking at Australian tennis players, I was really trying to roll up my sleeves and get you good guidance. But I think I’m just going to fall back on the answers I’m sure all of your American guests give you of Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Hugh Jackman.

Misha Zelinsky:

They’re your three?

Eric Schultz:

What’s that?

Misha Zelinsky:

They’re your three?

Eric Schultz:

I think they’re going to be my three. I don’t know if the show-

Misha Zelinsky:

I don’t know if they’re friends. We should probably check that, but I guess they are. I don’t know. There might be some-

Eric Schultz:

That would be very convenient. Yeah, exactly. I want to make this easy for them.

Misha Zelinsky:

They all can come in the same car. I don’t know if Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman get along, I don’t know. Maybe there’s a rivalry between them.

Eric Schultz:

Well, they were both in Les Misérables together, the film of that. So I’m happy to web diagram the connections.

Misha Zelinsky:

I’ll give you these, even though Russell Crowe strictly speaking is a New Zealander.

Eric Schultz:

Oh, shoot.

Misha Zelinsky:

But that’s fine, mate.

Eric Schultz:

I’ve never met him. But from what I know from his reputation I’m not surprised you want to distance yourself from him.

Misha Zelinsky:

As I always say, we have a very popular trope in Australia where all New Zealanders who are successful on the world stage become Australians, so he was gratefully adopted, but when he gets into trouble he became New Zealander, Russell Crowe. But he’s a very popular guy in Australia, owns a football team, seems like a good bloke to have a beer with. So he’d be a good guy to have at a barbecue.

Misha Zelinsky:

Anyway, look, Eric, thanks so much for coming on the show. It’s been a fantastic chat and I really appreciate your time, mate.

Eric Schultz:

Of course. Great to be here.

 

Richard Marles: Going Big – Navigating Australia’s foreign policy in a post COVID-19 world.

Richard Marles is the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Labor’s Shadow Minister for Defence. 

Misha Zelinsky caught up with Richard for a chinwag about how COVID-19 has accelerated history’s timeline, the rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, why the US is still a force for a good, how Australia’s record defence procurement program can rebuild our manufacturing sector, the choices facing Australia as it seeks to carve out an independent foreign policy,  why sovereign capability is the new black, how Australia must do more with its key pacific partners, and why – in order to figure out our place in the world – Australia must play big.

 

Misha Zelinsky:

All right, Richard Marles, welcome to Diplomates. Thanks for joining us.

Richard Marles:

It’s great to be here, Misha. Looking forward to it.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now, look. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to start any conversation these days without the C-word. COVID-19, now. This is a foreign policy podcast. You’re obviously Labor’s defence shadow. To your mind, what do you think is the single biggest … ? So many changes have come from COVID-19, but what do you think is the biggest single foreign policy challenge that’s come from the crisis?

Richard Marles:

That’s a really good question. I suppose what I think is ultimately, I think it’s an accelerant if I was to identify anything. I think that the sort of trends that we had seen out there probably go faster, but part of the world we’re in was one that was much more difficult to predict and obviously challenging for Australia. We use lines like this was the most challenging set of strategic circumstances that we had faced since the second World War, and we were saying that before COVID-19 took hold.

Richard Marles:

I think this has made that much more so. Kind of multiple times so, and so the breadth of possibilities for us and the unknowns for us, all of those, are much bigger, and ultimately where you get to is not being able to answer more questions about COVID-19 means, but you do realize these are really challenging strategic circumstances for us as a nation, and so the need for us to be able to take care of ourselves has probably never been as important, or as important as the second World War.

Misha Zelinsky:

I think that’s right, and certainly you can feel the way that things, the compression of history, and the pulling forward of things.

Richard Marles:

That’s a really good term.

Misha Zelinsky:

One of the things you just mentioned is looking after ourselves, now. I think a lot of Australians were shocked by some of the shortages that we saw in terms of PPE, health and safety equipment. Sovereign capability’s now become a bit of a new theme. Something that I’m very interested in. But given the exposure to just in time supply chains, and given the sense now that we don’t necessarily produce enough of the things that we need, in a defence context, what are the must haves for Australia? What are the things that we really need to produce here, to your mind?

Richard Marles:

Again, this is a really good example of where it’s changed thinking, or perhaps really clarified thinking. If you’d said to me back this time last year that the making of surgical masks was a thing that was essential to Australian security, I would’ve laughed, and yet earlier this year we had members of the Australian Army at a factory in Sheffield, I think, helping to churn out masks because we didn’t have enough of them.

Richard Marles:

If something as kind of simple, really, as a surgical mask, can be seen or become central to our own security, then what else? And it raises a whole lot of questions about that. From a defence point of view, I think the traditional answer to this question is that in an environment where the kind of platforms that you are part of are incredibly complex, and you take the joint strike fighter as an example. This is a fighter plane which has been made in and by numerous countries, and there are absolutely global supply chains in place there, the notion that going back to the second World War where we saw the making of fighter aircraft as part of our sovereign capability, that’s kind of not going to be the case now, but where people have got to in their thinking now is we at least may be able to maintain and sustain the platforms that we use here in Australia.

Richard Marles:

It’s certainly that. I think, though, there does need to be something of an audit of all the defence capabilities that we have, inputs that we have, and then over and above that traditional setting we clearly do need to be able to sustain and maintain the equipment that we use, but our best certain things in addition to that or as part of that that are absolutely critical. And I’d have to format some of that, but I think a much broader assessment of what’s in that basket, we will come to see as being what defines sovereign capability going forward.

Misha Zelinsky:

Obviously there’s the what of sovereign capability, i.e. the things that you get. What are the things that we need to have here, what are the things we need to store? But in terms of, also, the wear, the Henry Jackson Society did a study which showed that of the Five Isles nations that Australia was most exposed of all nations to the Chinese Communist Party in terms of key production areas. They identified 535 areas including 30 that were critical to future economic innovations. Should we care about the regime that supplies the goods as well as the goods themselves?

Richard Marles:

That’s a good question. Answered not specifically in relation to China but in the abstract, of course we need to be thinking about the places from which we import material and the places that we in effect do business with, and historically that’s been the case, and we do that. We do that right now. We would say, in relation to Iran and North Korea for example, that our ability to do business with those countries is significantly curtailed. In that spectrum, where’s China fit? I mean, we’re not … in a defence context, obviously, there’s not a lot of interaction in terms of defence supply chains, and I can understand that.

Richard Marles:

I think it is important, while China raises a whole lot of challenges in terms of Australia, it is a country with whom we’ve had a relationship for going back to the Wippen government. I don’t put China in the same category as countries like Iran or North Korea. I certainly don’t put China in the same category as the Soviet Union. I don’t think that’s who we’re talking about, and I think that the economic relationship that we have with China is appropriate. Now, in saying that, we want to make sure as a country that we have a diverse set of trading relationships around the world.

Richard Marles:

That’s just prudent. It’s, in a sense, the equivalent of having a balanced financial portfolio. We need to have a diverse set of trading relationships, and particularly as a country which is reliant on trade. But I do think that we have had an ongoing trading relationship with China, I think that is fair enough, and I’m comfortable with that going forward.

Misha Zelinsky:

In terms of, you talked about the speeding up of history, so to speak, and a contested Indo-Pacific is something that is going to be an inevitable feature of Australia’s foreign policy settings now. In terms of defence procurement and new kit, Australia, we’ve made this sort of commitment, I think it’s a bipartisan commitment, to 2% of GDP, which is around give or take 40 billion a year. Do you think given the challenges that we’re seeing and the speed of which this is going, is it enough in terms of a broad commitment?

Richard Marles:

I think it’s important that we determine our spending in relation to defence based on the strategic challenges that we face. That’s kind of, when you think about it, a matter of logic. If a country’s strategic circumstances are very predictable and certain, and it can’t get away without spending a lot, countries which find themselves in a precarious position spend more, but the rational act here is to be spending in proportion to what our strategic circumstances dictate, and I said, too, earlier, that what I know is they’ve become a whole lot more complicated rather than more simple as a result of COVID, but even prior to COVID they were as complex as they’ve been for a long time.

Richard Marles:

That’s got to be the guide in terms of what we’re doing. The second point is that, whilst 2% of GDP is a good benchmark, I do think that ultimately what’s important in terms of defence spending is that you have an absolute amount. In other words, that it’s not a functional GDP, because you need certainty in relation to programs over a very long period of time, which, if spending kind of fluctuates as a function of how GDP fluctuates, it’s going to make it hard to deliver those programs.

Richard Marles:

You look at submarines for example. This is a program which is going to be delivered over decades. There needs to be a predictable funding stream over that period of time, so I guess I make that point in the context where we’re in a recession for the first time in the better part of 30 years. If you measure defence spending as a proportion of GDP, that has implications there, and I think we need to be mindful of that, and the final point I make is that it’s really important that our defence force is dense, by which I mean there is a risk in having a wholeness about your defence force if you don’t have the wherewithal to ultimately use the critical platforms that you have.

Richard Marles:

We are purchasing, and I think appropriately so, some pretty significant platforms in terms of the naval ship building program, but also Lam400 and we mentioned earlier the joint strike fighter. Across the three services, you’re seeing an appropriate modernization of equipment, but it’s really important that we have the brunt behind that to make sure that we can use all of those, that we’ve got enough people, for example, that if we have the better part of 100 fighter planes we can use 100 fighter planes. If you’ve got 100 fighter planes, but you’ve only got the personnel to actually, effectively, operate a small part of that, then you don’t have 100 fighter planes because you can’t use them.

Richard Marles:

That’s what I mean in terms of there being, we’ve got to guard against the highness in the way in which we have a defence force, and a number of serious observers have made that observation about where we’re at at the moment, so we need to make sure that in terms of our spending we’re the opposite of that, which is why I say we need to have an ADF which is robust and dense, the opposite of being hollow, and I think that’s a very important thought in terms of how we set our budget. Ultimately, we face a really challenging world.

Richard Marles:

We face a challenging world where we have an assertive China, which is doing what great powers do, so I don’t really even say this with judgment. China is seeking to shape the world around it, but that does raise challenges for us, and our alliance with the United States is profoundly important and I think is as important as it has ever been going forward, and from where I sit, the more we have America engaged in East Asia, the better, but it’s also true to say that we have an American president who would regard unpredictability as being a virtue, and I can understand that, but it makes life difficult for allies.

Richard Marles:

And so I think with all, you put those things together, and what that means is we’ve got to make sure we’re in a position to be able to look after ourselves and that’s why our defence spending at this moment in time really matters.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, and I want to dig into the questions about US-China relations and what it means for Australian policy, but before we get off procurement, getting the amount of money that we’re spending on new kit, they’re big programs we’re talking about here, can we do more? In terms of innovation policy, what’s the role that the defence procurement program can play in sort of driving Australia up the innovation chain? And how can we make it to make a more complex Australian economy in terms of its manufacturing and innovation capability?

Richard Marles:

Defence industry, I think, plays a really important role there, and has done with a number of countries. If you have a place like Israel, they will say that so much of their being a country where innovation is very central to their economic character that at the heart of that is defence industry, and the kind of innovation that you see in defence industry, and partly that’s because defence equipment is about as high tech equipment as you get. It is literally at the very cutting edge of innovation and science, so if you’re in the business of making high end defence capability, then what you are is in the defence of making high end manufactured product, and for a first world nation that’s central to the ability to engage in manufacturing.

Richard Marles:

Successful first world economies that have export manufacturing as part of their economy do so at the highest end of the value chain, and defence industry can play an important role in getting you there. Having said that, it’s important that we understand how you get defence industry. When you look at countries that do it, they didn’t start off doing it because they thought, “Well, if we do a defence industry, that will lead the rest of the economy.” They’ve done it because they’ve had a strategic reason to be engaged in it.

Richard Marles:

Israel is a very obvious example, given the threats that have surrounded it for most of its existence, but you can take a country like Sweden which has a really strong defence-industrial base through a company like Saab, and at the heart of that is strategic decisions as well. Sweden was not a part of NATO, was really right there next to the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, and so needed to be in a position where it was able to look after itself, and needed to have a capacity to do defence manufacturing within its borders.

Richard Marles:

If Sweden hadn’t been a part of NATO, I’m not sure, for example, that Saab would exist in quite the way that it exists today, so strategic circumstances and strategic decisions that countries make which end up leading to successful defence industries, and then the benefit that can have for the general economy becomes a spinoff. One of my criticisms about where the government is at is that thinking through the ecosystem of defence industry hasn’t been their strong suit, and so there’s never really been a proper strategic rationale which has been put forward by the government for why we would have a defence industry.

Richard Marles:

There has been, I think most observers would say, that this government, having seen the car industry leave our shores on its watch, was looking for some answer to industry policy, and so has leapt upon defence industry as a proxy for a general industry policy. Well, okay, if that’s what they’ve done, is there an example anywhere in the world where that’s worked? And I think there is one. Strong defence industries come about through a strategic decision about having them in the first place.

Richard Marles:

I actually think there is a strategic rationale for us having a defence industry but you just never hear this government seem to articulate it. I think at the heart of what would be a strategic purpose for us having a defence industry is the fact that defence exports and defence partnerships around industry really go to a core of a nation’s interests and trusts. If you think of the situation we’re now in with France, with the building of our submarines, that has dramatically changed and upgraded our bilateral relationship.

Richard Marles:

France now is critically important as a bilateral partner to us as a nation because they’re involved in the building of our submarines. Well, actually, there’s the opportunity for us, in terms of the way in which we engage in defence industry, to start partnering with a whole lot of countries within our region, and if we did that I think defence industry could play a really important role in helping Australia be taken more seriously within the region and within the world, and that’s really important for us for a whole range of reasons, in terms of our shaping our strategic circumstances, and putting us in a much better position.

Richard Marles:

And I think defence industry, we can do it, and can play a really important role there, but you need to actually make that argument. And it’s not just that you need to make the argument to the Australian people. I think you need to make that argument to the defence establishment, and I frankly think this government haven’t even thought about the argument let alone made it, and so as a result you’re kind of seeing all of the hoopla that surrounded their claims around defence industry when Christopher Pine was defence industry minister, and in defence that’s all just gone by the wayside now. There is just a barren silence, and there is a real question about whether defence industry is actually made to, by this government, now, or not.

Misha Zelinsky:

Turning to US-China relations, at the moment it just seems a day doesn’t go past without some kind of an escalation between both sides, and certainly rhetoric, and also in diplomatic action, and Australia has likewise found itself in a similar situation. How should Australia handle these increasingly tense relationships between the Chinese Communist Party and the principal trading relationship on one hand, and as you said our absolute critical security alliance that’s our longstanding relationship there? How do we navigate and triangulate this, or can we?

Richard Marles:

Well, look, it’s a really good question. I suppose the starting point is I think the world feels a lot safer and more secure and more predictable when China and America are talking with each other, so it’s in our interest that that relationship be as best as it can be, and if it’s in our interests for the relationship between America and China to be in the best possible shape, then it actually stands to reason that it’s in our interests for our own relationship with China to be in the best possible shape, and so we do need to think about that, and that actually requires the adults in the room when it comes to this government playing a part in determining Australian foreign policy, and right now the adults, such as they are, I think are pretty silent.

Richard Marles:

We don’t hear a lot from our foreign ministry about a pretty fundamental issue in terms of our relationship with China. We don’t hear that much from our prime minister, to be honest, either, and the space tends to get filled by all the fringe developments on the part of our government ranks, and I don’t think that helps, and I think the second point is we need to have a kind of underlying philosophy. What are the guiding principles that we seek to put in place in terms of our relationship with China?

Richard Marles:

The guiding principles in terms of our relationship with the United States are clear. They’re our alliance partner. We have shared values, and we often use that phrase. That really means we’re both democracies, we both respect the rule of law at home, but importantly we both seek to create a global rules based to order, and we’ve been parties in seeking to do that really since the aftermath of the second World War, and we see that global rules based order where issues and contest is determined by rules rather than power as being central to a stable and prosperous global environment, which really is the way you would characterize the environment in East Asia for most of the period since the second World War, with the obvious kind of exceptions of the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

Richard Marles:

But those aside, we have seen a high degree of stability in that period, which has allowed East Asia to be a part of the world which has been an economic powerhouse, and that’s been of enormous advantage to Australia. But they are the shared values, and so what we’re about in our relationship with the United States is clear. What is the guiding principle behind our relationship with China? What are we trying to do here? And so I think the first thing is we don’t really ever get an answer to that question from this government. I think getting a government minister to try and have a crack at even answering that, you’d be hard pressed, and so often it feels to me like what you get is you get to irreconcilable propositions, or two propositions which they don’t seek to reconcile is perhaps the way to put it.

Richard Marles:

Yes, China’s a great country to deal with. On the other hand, China creates anxiety as the government would describe it. I would say that that’s not particularly helpful in terms of having a way forward. For me, and it’s just my view, but what I think matters is the theories of view, but my view, I think the starting point is in our relationship with China that actually we make clear we’re in alliance with the United States, and that that is fundamental to our worldview and to our national security, but from the place of being in an alliance with the United States, we value the relationship with China and we seek to build the best relationship that we can.

Richard Marles:

One which is robust enough that we’re able to express our national interests when that differs from Chinese action. One where we can raise questions of human rights but we do so in a manner which also acknowledges human rights achievements, and there are human rights achievements in China which we should acknowledge. It is important to speak on behalf of the Uyghurs, for example. It’s also important, if we’re being fair, to acknowledge that China is responsible for the single biggest delineation out of poverty in human history. It’s important to say both sides of that equation.

Richard Marles:

And we also need to submit ourselves to judgment. Part of the global order is that, and what we seek to do since the second World War with something like the human rights commission, is to place stock in the international community’s judgment of individual countries, and that means we’re not immune from that judgment. In a sense, we come to this with humility, but we will participate in judgment, and it’s important that we do that, and from that place we do seek to do all of those things but build the relationship and trade is the critical part of that.

Richard Marles:

Now, I actually think that can be done, but it does actually require articulating some kind of underlying set of principles which both try to do, and then it requires doing decent diplomacy. I mean, there needs to be personal relationships between senior figures in the Australian government and senior figures in the Chinese government. I don’t actually think there is one. I mean, I literally don’t think there is a single relationship that exists between a senior member of this government and a member of the Chinese government. I find that astonishing, and I find it astonishing in the context of how significant the relationship is, both in terms of its challenges and its opportunities, for our nation.

Richard Marles:

It’s certainly under previous governments there were personal relationships which were able to mediate the difficult moments, but right now there is just nothing, and I think that’s a real issue. I think we’ve got to do our foreign relations with the nation a whole lot better. I think we’ve got to have a set of guiding principles. I think we’ve got to do our diplomacy well. This isn’t rocket science; this is just saying we’ve got to actually do foreign policy like a grownup nation that we should be, and I think that would go a long way to helping us navigate what is the difficult terrain.

Misha Zelinsky:

I mean, it goes without saying that currently, we’re not in the good books of the Chinese Communist Party, and you talked a lot about striking the balance there. The business community basically goes into a tizz every time the relationships gets into any choppy water, saying essentially we should just acquiesce for the benefit of letting the good times roll on. In terms of the decisions that sort of earn the ire, if you look at foreign interference laws, if you look at decisions relating to Huawei and 5G, if you look around calling out of misinformation, if you look at South China Sea in terms of the adherence to international law, perhaps even more recently around Hong Kong although we tend to not really talk a great deal to be honest about domestic affairs in China as a country.

Misha Zelinsky:

Which of these things would you say that we’ve got it wrong on? Because an issue is approached, we’ve taken a decision, and it’s a sovereign decision of Australia which has seemed to earn the ire of the Chinese Community Party, so it’s very difficult to understand how you can navigate it in a way that protects sovereignty without stirring them up in that sense.

Richard Marles:

I guess the answer to that question is what I’ve given. I don’t think we’re doing our diplomacy very well. I don’t think we’ve got those relationships in place.

Misha Zelinsky:

But do you think you can make those decisions, but do them in a way that doesn’t, I suppose, upset the Chinese in the same way? Or … ?

Richard Marles:

I think you can build balance in a relationship so that there’s at least a chance that you can move forward in a context where we exercise our own voice. Now, let me be clear. It’s really important that we exercise our own voice. That is not something that can be compromised, but it needs to be the voice of the nation, and that’s what I’ve said before. We have a significant interest in the South China Sea. Most of our trade goes through the South China Sea. The UN convention on the law of the sea, which if you like is the rules of the road for that part of the world, for the high seas which includes that part of the world, is fundamentally important to us as an island trading nation.

Richard Marles:

And so we need to be able to exercise our voice in respect of our national interests when it comes to what’s going on in the high seas around the world, and in asserting the UN convention on the law of sea, specifically in the South China Sea. We must do that. As I said earlier, I think as a nation which seeks to contribute to a civilized world, it’s important that we are exercising our voice in relation to human rights issues such as Uyghurs, noting that we need to do it in a way where we submit ourselves to the same judgment, and where we acknowledge other treatments.

Richard Marles:

But that architecture only works if countries are willing to speak out on behalf of people around the world who it seems as being the subject of difficulty, and that certainly would understate for what was going on for the Uighur population in China. We need to be able to do those things and they’re not matters on which you should compromise. Having said that, we’ve seen government members write articles which use ham fisted analogies between China and the rise of Nazi Germany. Well, I mean, I don’t think that’s helpful at all. I don’t remotely think that that’s what China is.

Richard Marles:

And then I can understand why China gets upset about it. You have George Christians en up here using astonishing language in the context of COVID-19, which is not helping, and we don’t have a foreign minister or a prime minister who is articulating a clear voice on behalf of the nation in respect of what we need to be saying in terms of our national interests, what we should be saying in respect of China, while these voices are going on, and so they occupy the space in a way that those things are gratuitous, and I don’t think it is possible to defend those sorts of comments, and we’re talking about a relationship which matters deeply which is the basis on which a whole lot of people in Australia is employed, and that is a reasonable thing to be thinking about as well.

Richard Marles:

And then underlying all of that is a complete absence of any personal relationships which can help navigate through difficult waters. There are going to be difficult waters with China. China does raise challenges. No one’s suggesting that it doesn’t, and it is really important that we’re able to exercise our national voice in respect of those challenges. All the more reason, then, to get our diplomacy right, and to be doing it in a more smart way. Now, it is possible that we could have the best diplomacy in place, the best personal relationships that exist, but the need to say these things means that China would still act in the same way.

Richard Marles:

But wouldn’t it be nice to try that experiment? To actually see how it would go if we did diplomacy well. And I frankly think on a governmental level, I should say, I don’t think that this government is actually doing it, and let me also just be a little bit clear in terms of clarifying this. I think our professional diplomats do an excellent job, and I think our professional diplomats in Beijing do an excellent job, and I know a number of them, and they’re very highly regarded.

Richard Marles:

But at the end of the day, at a political level, you need critical relationships with countries that are critical to us, and right now this government has been an abject failure, really, in developing those relationships, and I’m not sure why anyone would think that that’s a good thing.

Misha Zelinsky:

Now, you talked about doing diplomacy well, so turning to the other side of the coin, President Trump, the US has become somewhat more of a capricious actor under Trump and has more of a go it alone, it’s even been actively hostile, to be honest, to alliances, or even multilateral institutions. What’s the implications for a middle power like Australia, and how can we shore up some of these things? For example, would you support Australia joining an expanded G7, something like a G10 with South Korea and other countries joining? Do you see a way that Australia can play a balancing role against US capriciousness, in that sense?

Richard Marles:

Well, I’d be careful about using that tone in respect to the US. I mean, firstly, I still fundamentally believe that the US is a force for enormous good within the world, and I think that our relationship with the United States, which has been there for a long time, is very deep. It is not just with one person and never has been. It’s at a commercial level, at a military level, at a scientific level, at a cultural level. It is very deep, and that depth is really important right now, and actually that relationship has been and in many ways continues to be highly predictable. I think the one thing with President Trump, as I said earlier, is he would see his own unpredictability as a virtue.

Richard Marles:

And I think that that makes life challenging for an ally. We would obviously prefer to have a more predictable line of sight about what the president’s actions are going to be, but that’s not who he is and so that’s just where it’s at, but I think it is really important that we understand, that we not completely judge America by one person. I mean, the president is clearly relevant, highly relevant, to the running of America, but America is a big place and it’s a very deep relationship and it’s a relationship that will be in place, say, five years from now, irrespective of who wins the presidential election this year.

Richard Marles:

But in a world post-Donald Trump, whenever that world is, we will still be in a very strong alliance with the United States, and they still maintain all the core values that we hold, and I think that’s really important in terms of how we view our relationship with America going forward. I think it’s about putting it all in context and understanding that, and I still come back to the point

Richard Marles:

I think what we need to be doing is making sure that we are able to take care of ourselves to the extent that we can, that we need to have more of an eye on that, and perhaps the other thing is that we need to contribute to the burden of strategic thought within our region. We need not just to be a dependable, solid ally, but a country which has ideas and views about our region which actually I think America is hungry to receive for us.

Richard Marles:

I think sometimes we underplay what we can contribute in that sense. It’s probably all a long way of saying I think now’s the time for Australian leadership, and I think leadership within our region, but leadership within the alliance as well, and I think that’s probably the best way of making sure that we keep the alliance in the best possible shape at this moment in time.

Misha Zelinsky:

In terms of Australian leadership, then, do you think that we should seek a seat at the table at some of these major diplomatic groupings? Obviously, under Rudd, Labor was very set true in creating the G20 for the GFC response which is still an important institution, but should we be seeking to deepen and expand our influence in things like an expanded G7 or something like that?

Richard Marles:

I think the more tables we’re at, the better, to be honest, and I think that would obviously be a fantastic opportunity for Australia were that to eventuate, and the G20 is a really important forum for Australia, and Australia helping to shape, for example, the East Asian Summit, is really important. Australia’s pivotal role back during the Horton Keen governments in the creation of APEC is important.

Richard Marles:

I think these are important bodies for us to be a part of, and I think the reasoning goes a bit like this. We have a real premium on being taken seriously. That might seem like an obvious and trite thing to say, but it really stems from the fact that, along with New Zealand, our two countries have pretty unique sets of strategic circumstances. Yes, we’re in an alliance with the United States, but that’s a country much bigger than our own with a capital on the Atlantic Sea board, and how in the northern hemisphere, and how they see the world is very different to the way we see it as a country of 25 million people in the southern hemisphere in the East Asian timezone.

Richard Marles:

We’re not part of, to use a Labor party analogy, in a sense, we’re not part of a faction. We’re not a European country in the European Union. We’re not an African country in the African Union. We have to navigate our way, in a large part, on our own, and that means we actually need to play bigger rather than smaller when it comes to foreign policy because we have to figure this stuff out for ourselves. Sharing the burden of strategic thought about our circumstances, we can do it with New Zealand, but beyond New Zealand and ourselves we really need to be figuring this out for ourselves, and that means we need to play big.

Richard Marles:

Play big is not just about a kind of misplaced sense of the extent to which we can shape the world. It’s actually about so that we learn. Being at these tables helps us to learn and to understand the way the world works, and we have a premium on that more than most, and if we’re going to be able to navigate our own way through, then actually we’ve got to be out there being in these forums, understanding the way the world’s going to work so that we can part our path because there’s not really going to be anybody else getting us there. Now, that’s actually very different to being a European nation, which can talk to other European nations, or as I said, an African nation which can share notes with those other countries in the African Union.

Richard Marles:

We’ve really got to work this stuff out for ourselves, so in many ways I’ll often say that we’ve got a bigger premium on playing big and on being taken seriously than almost any other country in the world, and I genuinely think that’s right, and so being present in these places, making sure that we are there at the G20, I think taking our place on the UN security council periodically; these are really important things for us to do because they help us understand how the world’s working, and we really need to understand it.

Misha Zelinsky:

Yeah, and so we’ve talked a lot about, I suppose, Indo-Pacific, East Asia, Southeast Asia, but drawing it right down to our backyard, our real backyard, and I know you’re someone who talks a lot about this, but the Pacific. You know, I mean, to put it bluntly, we’ve had the step up here from the government, but it somewhere we’ve dropped the ball, because China’s now actively contesting the region. It’s traditionally an area where it’s been Australia’s domain in terms of its diplomatic relationships. Do you think we have dropped the ball here, and are we doing enough?

Richard Marles:

I think over the journey it’s been as big a blind spot in terms of our strategic framework, in terms of our national security, as any. I welcome the step up, but the step up needs to be more than rhetoric. It’s got to be real and it’s got to be noticed by countries in the Pacific, and it’s got to be reflected in a fairly changed attitude from people in Australia. A point I’ve made a number of times is there’s 10 countries in the world who would probably identify their critical, number one bilateral relationship as not being with the United States or not being with China but with us, but go out there and ask anyone to name the 10 countries.

Richard Marles:

And it’s just something about our kind of psyche. You would think if you’re a practitioner in this space you would realize countries off in an instant, because the countries which see us as being completely central to their world necessarily has to define a space in which we is important as any, and yet by and large we tend not to think about this nearly enough in the way that we should. There is huge opportunity, I think, for us to play better and more impactfully within the Pacific in a way which will change positively the lives of those who live in the Pacific.

Richard Marles:

But we’ve really got to commit to that, and we can’t do this on the basis of being worried about what others might do in the Pacific in the sense that, if our reason for engaging with the Pacific is because of what someone else might do, then we’re getting it wrong in the start. Our call to action in the Pacific, I think, should be really clear. The millennium development goals, which were a relative measure of progress around a range of social indicators between the years 2000 and 2015, had the Pacific performing worse than any region on the planet.

Richard Marles:

Now, I actually think that has something to do with us, that that is, as you say, the region most proximate to us. It’s the part of the world where we can make the most difference. What that says is that, at a point in time, if we don’t change that trajectory, then the pacific will end up the least developed part of the globe, and that’s patently unacceptable. That will be reflected in maternal mortality rates, in short life expectancy, in low education, and a rage of other social indicators.

Richard Marles:

That would be the clearing call. We ought to be listening to that and saying that’s not acceptable in a part of the world where we have an ability to have a big impact, and so let’s really unpack the issues around that and try and affect meaningful change in relation to that, and that’s the way we will become the natural partner of choice for the countries of the pacific, by demonstrating to them that central to our interest is not any other country, but them. But that does require us to, I think, have a significant sea change in the way that we think about this, and ultimately that goes to who we are as a people.

Richard Marles:

That becomes a statement about how we see the significance of Australia as a polity in the world, positively impacting the world, and so I feel that Australian leadership, which is so central in terms of helping shape our strategic circumstances on the big questions that we’ve been talking about, the relationship with the United States, the challenges that are posed by China. Australian leadership is critical in terms of, as best we can, shape those strategic circumstances, but that Australian leadership in my view begins in the Pacific. That’s where we find it, and so it really does require us to think very deeply about it, and I do think there has been more attention in relation to the Pacific over the last couple years, but I don’t think nearly enough to turn around what I think has been a blind spot for this country for a long time.

Misha Zelinsky:

You spoke in a very positive context there, but I mean, there is a flip side there where there’s some systems competition underway. How concerned are you about things like debt book diplomacy, and China seeking to basically rope in the Pacific nations into the BRI program, and the prospect there of critical assets falling into control potentially of a more assertive China? Is that something we should be worried about? You know, there was a talk about Vanuatu potentially being a base for Chinese military assets. How worried should we be about that kind of sort of hard projection of power into our region?

Richard Marles:

I think it’s in Australia’s national interest for us to be the natural partner of choice for the countries of the Pacific. I think that’s the point here, and I think we get there by focusing on the countries of the pacific themselves, and I think if we get worried about what other countries are doing, and certainly if we start lecturing the Pacific about who they can have relationships with, then we’re not on a pathway to success here. Success lies in us focusing on the relationship that we have with the Pacific and getting it right, and that at its heart is about making sure that we place the interests and the fortunes of the people of the Pacific at the center of what we seek to be doing in the Pacific.

Richard Marles:

Now, we can do all that, and we are in a position where we can be a natural partner of choice, and I feel very confident about that, but I also don’t think that that’s inevitable. I don’t think that that happens by us just being here, and I think it does in large measure define circumstances at the moment but I don’t think it necessarily always will, but I think it’s within our power if we get our relationship right with the Pacific to make sure that that is the enduring characterization of our relationship to the Pacific, and that’s in our national interest, but that’s in the interest of the people in the Pacific, and it’s what we should do.

Richard Marles:

It’s who we should be as a people. But I know that if we are really focused on the plight of those in the Pacific, and in a sense the outrageousness of in some places life expectancy for them ending in their 50s, and that we really seek with our heart but with the best brain that we can bring into this equation as well to change that, then that’s all that’s going to matter. The rest is actually going to take care of itself. It really will.

Richard Marles:

But that’s the place that we’ve got to get to, and you know, what frustrates me at times is that … let me sort of declare, I love the pacific and I’ve completely fallen in love with it, but it frustrates me that not enough of us understand it and see its importance, but also see the cultural wonder that represents, and I’ve opened up hearts to how incredible a part of the world it is, and how lucky we are to really live as part of it, and to have the opportunity that we have to contribute to it.

Richard Marles:

That’s where we’ve got to go. There’s kind of an emotional connection which I think that we’ve got to get to. It’s interesting comparing us with New Zealand in respect of this. New Zealand do, I think, identify in a deeper way with the Pacific, for a whole lot of reasons that make sense. I mean, Auckland is a much more Pacific city than any city that exists in Australia. New Zealand is part of Polynesia, so you can see why it happens, and maybe it is a tall order to ask Australia to sort of have that same cultural connection, but actually we have a lot more presence in the Pacific than New Zealand. Much, much more.

Richard Marles:

And if we could back it up with just a bit of that kind of connection then I think that working alongside New Zealand would go a long way to securing the kind of interests that we need to in terms of the relationships that we should be building with the countries of the Pacific.

Misha Zelinsky:

It’s a huge responsibility.

Richard Marles:

It is.

Misha Zelinsky:

It’s great to hear you talk about it so passionately. Switching gears slightly, I think the profound change, and we could do a whole podcast about this so you’ll probably have to do this at a reasonably brief level, but I mean, open and closed systems. Open and closed systems, and political warfare, this seems to be, I think, the preeminent challenge of the 21st century, and one of the things that worries me as someone, and I think you obviously share my view of the world in this sense, is that we’re both passionate about democracies, passionate about open societies, but autocracies seem to be gaining our openness in a way that is very difficult for us to resist, and at the same time closing themselves off to, I suppose, the virtues of openness that we would see in terms of interacting with open societies.

Misha Zelinsky:

How can open societies prevail, and how can they beat closed systems, and do you think they can?

Richard Marles:

Well, I certainly hope that human progress and prosperity lies with human rights and with democratic thoughts and democratic freedoms, because that’s what I passionately believe in. I think over the long run innovative thought both in terms of the evolution of society in a social sense, but also in a technological sense, in terms of size, have performed better in open societies where there is freedom of expression and freedom of debate, and I think that that is still going to be the case going forward. I do think that there are real challenges in relation to the evolution of technology which present themselves, and I understand the point that you’re making that in closed systems there might be ways in which closed systems can deal with the development of technology around IT.

Richard Marles:

But ultimately I think this has got a fair way around and I do passionately believe in the power of government of the people by the people for the people. I think putting the people central to the equation is still the best recipe going forward, and so I don’t take democracy for granted. I think it is something that needs to be continually worked at, but I am as strong a believer in it at this point in my life and at this point in time as I have ever been, and I think that is still fundamentally critical to the future of a more civilized world.

Misha Zelinsky:

Well, a very uplifting place than the more formal part of the proceedings. I know that you’ve been dying to get to this part and the audience can’t wait to hear your answer about my trademark clunky segue to my incredibly hokey and lame part of the show, the fun part of the show. Now, you’re a very worldly man, Richard. Who are the three people, foreign guests, that would come alive or dead that would be brought along to a barbecue with you up there in Dulong? It might be difficult to get them there even if they are alive, with the COVID restrictions made, but it’s fantasy football so we can do our best.

Misha Zelinsky:

But who are they and why, mate?

Richard Marles:

Okay, so I’m answering this in a political way.

Misha Zelinsky:

Well, you are a politician, mate. I can’t-

Richard Marles:

Exactly. There’d be a sporting version of this where I would love to meet Ty Woods, and I’d probably like to meet Bobby Jones, and you could kind of throw in Shane Warne. Also I kind of-

Misha Zelinsky:

We’re going to get together, mate. If Warnie is coming I’m definitely coming over, so yeah.

Richard Marles:

I also think, though, I mean, they’re all I’m sure great people. I love their efforts on the sporting field and I kind of have a bit of a rule. I don’t know whether you want to get to know your sporting heroes. I just enjoy what they do on the sporting field.

Misha Zelinsky:

Exactly. You’ve always got to be careful meeting your heroes, they do say.

Richard Marles:

Let me answer the question in a political way, though. None of them are alive. Abraham Lincoln for sure is definitely my great political hero, but I would love to have him at a barbecue because by all accounts he was a raconteur. He was funny. He was self-deprecating. He had a kind of certain melancholy, but a warm kind of charm about him which I would love to experience firsthand, and he is the great man.

Richard Marles:

Churchill would be there as well. I mean, Churchill, whatever else, he would be fun. There would certainly be no shortage of drinks if he was there, and you get the sense that a guy who routinely was in the bath, as I understand it, sipping alcohol throughout the entirety of the second World War, not that he was in the bath throughout the entirety, but he was there on many days, I mean, that is pretty amazing. He is going to be fun at a dinner party, and again, it is the defining moment of modern history and he is the central character to it, and if anyone won the second World War, I mean obviously not one person, but the person who had the most influence on it was Winston Churchill, so it would be great to have him there.

Richard Marles:

And the third goes back a bit deeper in history. I think it would be fascinating to speak to Queen Elizabeth the First. She really, I think, is probably the great English monarch, and when you think about how does the British Empire come to its preeminence, I think the seeds are there in her reign, and she comes to power, you know, father is Henry the Eighth. There is a kind of tussle for power which she was probably unlikely to win and yet does.

Richard Marles:

I doubt there has been anyone in history who has been more underestimated in terms of their ability to do the job. People were desperate for her to find a partner because they felt that there needed to be a male presence around, and she resolutely refused to that, and then becomes the greatest of them all. That’s somebody I reckon would be fascinating to meet. Her kind of desire to plot her own path and do what she was going to go, and not conform to what just about every voice around her wanted her to do, that would be a force of nature I’d like to meet.

Misha Zelinsky:

That’s three good ones, there, mate. Kicking the ass of slave owners, kicking the ass of the Nazis, and kicking the ass of the Irish and the Scots, mate, so it’s a good list. Well, look, we’ll leave it there. Richard Marles, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a fantastic chat, and we’ll catch up soon.

Richard Marles:

Thanks, Misha.

 

Max Bergmann: Center for American Progress

Foreign Interference and Russia 2016 Election Special.

Max Bergmann is a senior fellow and director of the Moscow Project at the Center for American Progress, where he focuses on European security and Russia policy. Previously he served in the U.S. Department of State where he focused on political-military affairs, arms control and international security. He was also speechwriter to Secretary of State John Kerry. A graduate of the London School of Economics, Max joined Misha Zelinsky to discuss foreign interference in democracy, what the Mueller Report uncovered about the US 2016 election, whether the Congress should impeach the President, how Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum, and how democracies can fight back against hostile actors. 

Misha Zelinsky:             So, Max, welcome to Diplomates. How are you?

Max Bergmann:            Good, how are you?

Misha Zelinsky:             I’m well, and we are obviously doing this by the miracle of the internet. I think it’s about the end of the day in DC and the start of the day here in Australia, so welcome to the show.

Max Bergmann:            Thanks so much for having me.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so, I was thinking about the best place to start. Now your background is foreign interference. You have a background in the US State Department and you’re working in foreign interference at the Center for American Progress. I suppose firstly, before we get into the specifics, why does foreign interference matter at all? Why would we at all be concerned about this?

Max Bergmann:            Well, I think it matters even more now than it has in the past and it’s partly because of how our politics work now. It’s how people get their information, how the Internet has transformed people’s lives, has made, I think modern societies particularly vulnerable to foreign interference in a way that wasn’t really the case, I think, in previous eras, at least not to the same degree. Partly because, now, it’s very easy to reach people to connect with people, to influence different segments of the population and so, the way foreign governments are interfering, I think is particularly important because for our Democratic politics, both in Australia and the United States and everywhere there’s a democratic country, it’s important that that be an internal conversation. It’s always going to be influenced in some ways by the broader world, by broader dynamics, but when you start having foreign governments saying, “We are going to deliberately get involved and find a way to tip the balance, put our thumb on the scale in a particular direction,” where you start undermining the very legitimacy of democratic politics. And the way we live now with this modern network society, it’s increasingly easy and available to foreign countries to try to put their thumb on the scale.

Max Bergmann:            And so, I think it’s a particularly pernicious threat to open societies, to open liberal democratic countries where our openness is our big great advantage and what these foreign governments are trying to do is really undermine that and take advantage of it. And so I think it’s a real worry, it’s a real threat and a real concern and something that all democratic societies now really have to pay attention to.

Misha Zelinsky:             And, of course, the most famous example, there are other examples we could get into, the most famous example that’s been debated lately is the 2016 US presidential election and the interference of the Russians there. Before we get into the Mueller report and the political dimensions of all this, what do we know specifically? What are the uncontested facts in this space?

Max Bergmann:            Well, so there’s a lot, actually of uncontested facts and Mueller’s 400+ page report I think, most of that, almost all of that, is largely uncontested. But I think when it comes to the foreign interference dimension, in particular, now I think the way the Mueller report has been interpreted, I think, particularly outside of America and abroad is, well it didn’t quite have the smoking gun to nail Trump. I don’t actually think that’s quite true, but the more important part of the Mueller report for foreign countries, for foreign democracies, is the first 50 some odd pages where he outlines a Russian conspiracy against the United States. We forget that Mueller has brought all these criminal charges and what Mueller effectively identifies in Volume I, in the first 50 pages, are two distinct Russian lines of effort to influence American politics. And they’re quite successful in 2016.

Max Bergmann:            And that first line of effort was to social media, through the creation of the Internet Research Agency. This is sort of a pseudo-private oligarch funded operation in St. Petersburg. And what does it do? It was trying to influence American, the political discussion on social media, facebook, on Twitter, this is where we hear about the troll farms, the bots, which are automated accounts. And what the Russians effectively figured out is how to game the American debate, how to game the social media companies by, if you amplify content, if everyone’s retweeting the same thing, if you create automated bots that is all retweeting racist content, some of that racist content gets amplified. Lots of people then look at it. He gets promoted. And so that was one major line of effort. Where the Russians were trying to interfere both to sow discord in American politics, basically amplify our racial divisions, amplify aspects of American political debate that they wanted to promote, and then the other aspect was to simply promote Donald Trump. There were a lot of Russian accounts that were promoting Donald Trump. And this was not a Mickey Mouse sized operation. It had roughly 80 people devoted just to the United States, just to the 2016 election with a multimillion dollar budget.

Max Bergmann:            Now if you look at the Clinton campaign’s digital operation, this is the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, she had roughly 80 people devoted to digital. So you see what is, in effect, a Russian online campaign, digital campaign, devoted to influencing American politics. And probably, it’s not going to be as effective as the Clinton digital campaign, but, on the other hand, this is the campaign, on the Russian side, willing to say things that normal political campaigns wouldn’t do, push certain messages, attack candidates in ways that people that were had to be true to who they were, had to represent themselves wouldn’t say.

Max Bergmann:            And so the second line of effort, so the first line is the social media campaign that Mueller outlined. The second line of effort is the hacking. Now this is basic intelligence operations. A Russian military intelligence unit within the Russian GRU that was devoted, not to hacking the State Department or hacking a diplomat’s phone, but to hacking an actual political campaign. And hacking the personal email accounts of John Podesta, who is the cofounder of Center for American Progress, who I should disclose the place that I work at, but also, penetrating the Democratic Party, which they were able to successfully do.

Max Bergmann:            When we think about political campaigns, political campaigns, especially in the American context, are basically like small start up companies that suddenly balloon overnight and have all these young twentysomethings working for them. And so they are quite actually easy in some ways to penetrate or should be. Actually, the Clinton campaign took cybersecurity incredibly seriously. So the Clinton campaign actually wasn’t breached. It was a personal email account of Podesta and it was the Democratic Party. But so the Russians broke in, stole tens of thousands of emails from both the Democratic Party and from John Podesta. And not only that, they also stole a lot of stuff, like their field operations research, basically their battle plans for the campaign, and we don’t know what they did with that. We know that they release the emails into different waves through Wikileaks, which was an online transparency organization that felt no bones about releasing content that was given to them by Russian intel and release that right before the Democratic convention in July, which was the first release. And then the second release, which came in October was sort of the October surprise of the election.

Max Bergmann:            And so it had a huge impact on the race, in a race that was so close there is no doubt that when you look at the impact of both those lines of effort, it definitely swung the election, tilted the election in Donald Trump’s favor. So that’s in the Mueller report and I think it’s something that all countries, that all democratic societies should look at those, especially the first 50 pages, to learn about, hey, if this could happen in the United States, how could this also happen here in our country?

Misha Zelinsky:             And I suppose I should apologize on behalf of the Australian people for the role that Julian Assange played in Wikileaks. We won’t get into that too much, but that was a really good run down of the 400 page report and a two-year investigation, but I think you’re right. One of the things that’s fascinating to me is that, you’re right, the question of the smoking gun that if Mueller wasn’t able to find a recording between Vladimir Putin and either Donald Trump himself or someone in the Trump organization, campaign, that this was all going to be a farce of an investigation, that it wasn’t going to be that… One of the things that I think would be good for you to unpack would be all the people in the Trump campaign, that worked on the campaign, that have since been indicted and arrested and charged, and in some cases, imprisoned. So if you could give us some idea, a quick rundown of the rap sheet, I think that would be interesting.

Max Bergmann:            Yeah, no sure. The Mueller investigation was probably the most successful special counsel investigation that we’ve ever had in the United States. And the report that he produced is the most damning thing ever written, most damaging official document ever written about a President of the United States. And as you mentioned, the Mueller investigation has led to guilty pleas of Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; his deputy campaign chairman, Rick Gates; his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen; his first National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn; as well as a Foreign Policy Advisor, a guy name George Papadopoulos. It has produced a tremendous amount of indictments and charges also against Russians and Russian affiliated individuals. So this was an investigation that found a lot of lawbreaking, found a lot of crime.

Max Bergmann:            I think when it comes to Donald Trump, what we see here is, in fact, a classic counterintelligence investigation, that what Mueller found was a lot of smoking guns. What he didn’t find was Donald Trump pulling the trigger. When we think about famous, if we go back to the Cold War era or post-Cold War era, where the US was busting a lot of Russian or KGB agents that were embedded in the CIA, the FBI, we have the famous Aldrich Ames case and the famous Robert Hanson case, what happened in both of those, the FBI caught them at the dead drop. They got them in the act of committing this crime. In this case, Mueller was only appointed to investigate a year after the election almost and what seems pretty clear is the FBI was very slow on the uptake in terms of Russian interference during the actual election. Some of this was actually the fault of the Obama administration not being super focused on the threat of Russian interference at the time. It caught everyone off guard. And so that gave people a lot of time to delete messages, to delete emails, to erase things on their phone and coordinate stories.

Max Bergmann:            So what we see in the Volume II of the Mueller report is the crime, is the crime that implicates the President of the United States, his obstruction of justice. And we have the famous story here in the US of Al Capone who was this famous mobster during the prohibition era in the 1920s and how did Al Capone go down? Well, of tax evasion. No one says that Al Capone wasn’t this famed mobster, he was avoiding taxes because he was this famed mobster. But it was the tax evasion that got him. And I think what we see here is Robert Mueller, the reason why there’s 198 pages of Volume I devoted to Trump’s Russian contacts, the Russian contacts with Donald Trump in the Trump campaign with Russia is because Mueller was describing a story, a story of something that Donald Trump wanted to hide, wanted to conceal, wanted to obstruct from the investigators that were looking into it.

Max Bergmann:            And I think in some cases Donald Trump was successful. But there’s also a lot of smoking guns. Maybe I’ll just run through them quickly. One, they have the campaign chairman, Paul Manafort meeting with someone who the FBI believes is a Russian intelligence agent. But it’s not only the FBI, it’s also Paul Manafort and his deputy, also believe this individual Konstantin Kilimnik is connected to Russian intelligence. And they meet with him on August 2 in the midst of this campaign. Throughout the election, they’re sharing polling data, internal polling data from the campaign. This is sort of the crown jewels of the Trump campaign. This is confidential information about how their polling numbers, the messages they’re looking to push, and they also shared the campaign battle plan, the states they’re looking to focus on. And they’re sharing it with Konstantin Kilimnik, who they know is sharing it with Oleg Deripaska, Who is this Putin connected oligarch who’s been sanctioned by the United States. And why to they want it shared with Deripaska? I think it’s fairly clear that they knew Deripaska was sharing that with the Kremlin more broadly.

Max Bergmann:            So we have a very unique chain of events to Russian intel from the trunk campaign to Russian intel with very few actors in between. Now Mueller identified all that. His problem was Paul Manafort was a cooperating witness, decided to not cooperate about why he was providing that information to Konstantin Kilimnik. And so Mueller withdrew the cooperation agreement, Manafort’s now going to jail for a very long time and the question is why did Manafort not want to disclose that information? And I think the conclusion is pretty clear. It’s because he was sharing that information with the intent that it was going to get to the Russian government.

Max Bergmann:            Now there’s other examples of Donald Trump’s advanced knowledge and awareness of the WikiLeaks releases. In fact, not only that, instructing his campaign to establish a back channel to WikiLeaks knowing that WikiLeaks was getting the content for the releases from Russian intel. And why did they know that? And this is the other bombshell, because the Trump campaign was told about it. The Trump campaign was informed by this Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, in London that the Russians had “dirt on Hillary Clinton” that they had thousands of emails. And this was in April and May before it was known to the world.

Max Bergmann:            So what we see are all these sort of… this awareness on the part of the Trump campaign about what the Russians were doing, this willingness to share internal Trump campaign data and information that would be very useful to the Russian campaign that they were running, that I mentioned earlier. And so Trump’s awareness of this crime, Russia was doing and his willingness to say go out, collude, connect, meet with the Russians. The Trump campaign effectively ran toward the crime. And that’s what Mueller outlines.

Max Bergmann:            Now he says, I wasn’t able to find any tangible agreement, tacit or expressed, that could amount to a conspiracy between the Russian efforts and the Trump efforts, but he did find a lot of collusion and then he found a lot of obstruction of justice in the Volume II.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so, I’m keen to turn to, I suppose, where this goes from here. But just going back a step, you talk about, you outlined a very concerning and alarming series of facts, the concerning part, I think, is some of this was known. The Obama administration certainly knew. The FBI had some concerns. Why was there no red flag going up before the election? Why was this, in effect, sat on and we didn’t hear about it until after the fact?

Max Bergmann:            So I think there’s a few reasons and it’s a great question. I think, one, I think everyone was just caught off guard. We’re the United States of America, no one messes with our internal democratic politics. It’s just not a threat that we expected or anticipated, partly because we can deter foreign actors from doing that by the very nature of us being the world’s largest superpower. And so I think there was a little bit of just lack of imagination that occurs in every major intelligence failure, whether it’s 9/11, whether it’s Pearl Harbor, of just not anticipating how a foreign actor would actually go about attacking you.

Max Bergmann:            When the DNC, the Democratic Party was hacked, and it became known on June 14, 2016, it was actually reported in the Washington Post that day, the initial response from US government or thought process was that, well, this is happened before. It’s not unusual for foreign countries to want to hack a political party, political campaign. Barack Obama’s campaign was hacked by the Chinese in 2008. Lots of Washington think tanks are hacked all the time by China, by Russia. And so it was sort of viewed as this was traditional intelligence gathering, this wasn’t about influencing events, it was about, you know that the Russians wanted to know where the Clinton campaign may be going or where the Democratic Party may be going on certain issues. You could very quickly scratch the surface there and say, well that didn’t quite add up based on what they were doing. I think that was the basic sense at the time.

Max Bergmann:            That all changed on July 22 when the Russians, through WikiLeaks, release the DNC emails right before the Democratic convention. This was a huge deal. This resulted in the resignation of the head of the Democratic party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, at the time, it left a massive rift between the Clinton and Bernie supporters. And so suddenly, at that moment, there is a realization in the US government that they have a problem.

Max Bergmann:            After this point where the FBI, who had sort of been slow on the uptake of conducting counterintelligence investigation gets information from a good Australian diplomat in London who had actually had drinks with George Papadopoulos in early May where Papadopoulos who’s a foreign policy advisor to Trump, told him that the Russians had this dirt and were going to release it. This information is passed to the FBI. The FBI opens a counterintelligence investigation. But then what we see… Donald Trump’s stance during the election was problematic. Because he was saying, dismissing the notion that Russia was involved, it meant that if President Obama got involved and said the Russians were doing this, they were worried it would be seen as partisan, they were worried it would be seen as tipping the scale on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Max Bergmann:            And so what we saw, in September and October, was the Obama White House going to the Republicans in Congress, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, who were the two leaders in Congress, and saying, “Hey, let’s issue a bipartisan statement.” And both of them turned it down and said no. We think this would be partisan. And so what we saw was actually a breakdown, I think, it wasn’t just a failing on the Obama administration, it was also a failure on behalf of the Republican Party. We have political parties to act as guardrails for our democracy and here was a Republican Party failing to step up.

Max Bergmann:            Now that being said, there’s no doubt that the Obama administration’s response was way too weak, was way too timid. They should have gone out and spoke out more loudly than they did. When they did try to speak out, well, there was two things that happened. One, they tried to pick up the red phone and tell the Russians, the red phone was used during the Cold War to avert a nuclear crisis, this was actually picked up where John Brennan, the head of the CIA, told his counterpart, “Cut it out. We know you’re doing this.” And Obama told Putin at the G 20 summit, I believe in China.

Max Bergmann:            The second thing that happened was they decided to go public. On October 7 about noon, this was a Friday they released from the head of the Department of Homeland Security the head of the director of national intelligence, a statement about Russian interference. Then a few hours later the biggest bombshell of the election happens, which is Trump’s Access Hollywood tape comes out and this is where Donald Trump is basically bragging about committing sexual assault on a hot mic. And then 29 minutes after that tape is released, we have this good Australian, Julian Assange, of WikiLeaks, releasing at 4:32 PM on the Friday on October 7, the John Podesta emails. And so, suddenly announcing to the public that yes, Russia was doing this just got completely buried in the news cycle and no one paid any attention.

Max Bergmann:            So I think what we have is a failure of imagination, slow in how to respond and how to react, being hamstrung by Republicans, and finally acting and then it getting consumed in the broader news environment. So that’s a pretty long answer to the simple question, but I think anyone in the Obama administration who says they would do it exactly the same as they did it is lying. I think everyone looks back, and also has the assumption… The last thing I should say is everyone assumed she was going to win. So it’s easier not to do something. It’s always easier not to act than to act, especially when you could say well she’s going to win it.

Misha Zelinsky:             They certainly weren’t alone in predicting that Hillary was going to win. I was certainly on board with that prediction as well. So I think… Thank you for that really concise answer.

Misha Zelinsky:             So I suppose she sort of touched on a bit of the politics. I think it’s a good time, because this has now become political but first there is a National Security element discuss, but there’s a political dimension to this.

Misha Zelinsky:             The Mueller report itself has become politicized. So I’m curious of your take, the Republicans are effectively now saying through the Attorney General William bar put out a summary of the report, effectively saying that case closed. The president is saying he’s exonerated. Some Democrats think it’s time to move on. Is it time to move on from this in your opinion?

Max Bergmann:            No. As you and your listeners could probably tell, I’m fairly committed to this topic. No, I think it’s the exact opposite. I think the last few months of inaction on the Democratic side of the house, the stonewalling from the White House, have been a real disservice. I think there’s a real need to act. I think what’s broadly happened here is, to step back for a minute, the last two years the Democrats were in kind of a tough spot actually. They were wanting to let the process play out, not prejudge an ongoing criminal investigation. Now Donald Trump was not doing that. Donald Trump was working the rest. Donald Trump was basically running, for the last two years a campaign against being impeached. He was telling the American people there’s nothing there, this is all a hoax, no collusion, no collusion, no collusion. I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this. And so he sent a very clear message while the Democrats’ message has been where basically protect the Mueller investigation, wait for Mueller, which isn’t really a clear message.

Max Bergmann:            And I think that continued after the Mueller report where what you now have is, I think a Democratic Party that wasn’t prepared for the Mueller report to be as damaging as it was. And so, partly because of that, they’ve also had to view this through a more political lens of is this a smart political step to move forward with impeachment because, perhaps if we move forward on impeachment, then Donald Trump will be able to say that we’re just obsessed with impeaching him and the public will view us as not really focused on their interest but focused on just getting a Donald Trump.

Max Bergmann:            I don’t really view it that way. I think that what this is… That impeachment is bad, that being impeached is bad. It’s not something anyone wants. It’s fairly simple and that if the Democrats in the house move forward on impeachment, that will send a real signal to the public that Donald Trump’s actions have been unacceptable. I think they’re walking… There’s all these other competing domestic political issues as well, but I think that’s the basic thrust here is that it is important for House Democrats to hold Donald Trump accountable for the action that’s outlined in the Mueller report, because failure to do so, I think essentially means that what the Mueller report then will become is, that sort of a new guide, it’s a new precedent for how you can actually collude with the foreign intelligence service in running a political campaign and get away with it. And I think that’s a terrible precedent to set, especially getting into a 2020 election cycle.

Misha Zelinsky:             So what about the facts. Not to make the arguments for the House Democrats, because you’re certainly more plugged into the Democratic Party than I could hope to be, but the argument seems to be, yes the House could impeach Donald Trump now that there’s a majority since the midterms. Then the Republican Senate would likely exonerate, given the way that you require a super majority to remove a president and the Senate to find him guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. So is that a relevant point? Do you think that’s relevant? And would that make the case for exoneration greater?

Max Bergmann:            No, I think that’s a very relevant point. And that’s the argument that House Democrats are making saying that this is a symbolic exercise. Here’s the thing, is that every piece of live legislation that Democrats in the House are passing as well is a symbolic exercise because there’s this roadblock called Mitch McConnell who runs the Senate and is the Republican leader and is not going to pass any legislation that goes forward and actually impeaching… My counterargument would be, look, Republicans in the Senate have been like frightened turtles over the last two years. They haven’t wanted to talk about this. It has been something that they are very glad not to have to be confronted with. The problem, I think… I think that if Democrats were to move forward and actually impeach and then move it forward to the Senate and there would be a trial in the Senate. That has happened very rarely in American history. Bill Clinton, it happened in 1999. Richard Nixon, we never got to that point because he resigned. And then it happened in 1866, I believe, with Andrew Johnson, after Abraham Lincoln.

Max Bergmann:            So this would send, I think, a big signal to the country. It would be treated very seriously in the press. And then you’d be forcing Republicans in the Senate to stand up and to defend the actions and conduct as outlined in the Mueller report. And I think where it makes sense for me to do this is I think you’ll actually get some Republicans to join forces with Democrats. No I don’t think you’re going to get the two thirds majority to remove Donald Trump, but I think you could see a real strong bipartisan rebuke. And that will also be very useful for a Democratic candidate opposing Donald Trump in 2020 that can then run on the argument that Donald Trump is, in fact, a criminal and should be going to jail. That strikes me as a strong argument to make in 2020.

Max Bergmann:            And if you get the 2020, and it doesn’t poll well, you can always just run on other issues. But, to me, the conduct outlined in the Mueller report just cannot stand, and I think the political calculation here, the political machinations don’t make a lot of sense to me, number one. Number two, even if they did, I think there’s a duty on the part of members that took an oath to uphold our Constitution to act. We’re not a parliamentary system. We only have one way to remove a leader and that is through the impeachment process And the impeachment process-

Misha Zelinsky:             As an Australian, mate, I should probably say that removing leaders is not without its problems, but sorry not to cut you off.

Max Bergmann:            That is a good flag. On the other hand, not removing leaders that are hugely problematic, having to sit out and wait for four years, is also a problem. And the designers of our Constitution back in 1770s, 1780s, put this in there for a reason. And they put it in there for a guy like Donald Trump who is basically used corrupt means to gain the office, who has committed high crimes and misdemeanors while in office in the obstruction of office. So if you’re not going to use it now, then when? And I think not acting just sets an incredibly terrible precedent for the future of our democracy.

Misha Zelinsky:             And so you talked about Watergate. The Clinton comparison, I mean I think it’s an interesting one given when you consider the relative conduct, I think it speaks for itself, but the Watergate ones more instructive because that was a Republican president in the end who while was not impeached, was removed because the Republicans Senate abandoned him or the Republican senators. Do you have any confidence that that’s the case given where the Republican Party is at now? And is it not relevant political calculus? You’ve talked about some may be coming over, but is that enough, really, in the…

Max Bergmann:            So the Nixon example, I think is one that we… in America’s not been totally internalized. It’s viewed through this, All the President’s Men movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman where, aha, Woodward and Bernstein got it and then Nixon resigned fairly quickly. But it was a two-year process. It was very similar. It was the slow burn of information that came out. It wasn’t until the very end that political support for Nixon collapsed. Nixon’s approval ratings had gone down throughout the process and Watergate helped push them down, but Republicans actually stood by his side up until the very end. And suddenly the dam broke and it broke completely and Nixon saw that there was no future. And so I think the… Here’s what I would tell the Democrats in the modern age is that you don’t know unless you try. You don’t know unless you push forward.

Max Bergmann:            And why did Nixon’s support collapse? Because House Democrats were moving forward with an impeachment inquiry. It was the impeachment inquiry which then elicited new information, get more information out there, the tape broke, but it was that that was the forcing function that put pressure on Republicans to justify it. And the political results through the Democratic Party in the 1974 election, it was the biggest wave election, I think, in modern history where Democrats won by 17% and two thirds majority in the house. And then, the only Democrat to win in the period between 1968 and 1992 was Jimmy Carter in 1976. And why did he win? Partly on this backlash, this anti-Watergate backlash.

Max Bergmann:            And so I think, if I were the Democrats, I would look at that example as the high-end. Nixon resigning essentially confirmed everything that everyone was saying about him. And then you’d look at the ’98, ’99 Clinton scandal. And what happened in ’98 was Republicans lost five seats in the house. This wasn’t this huge backlash against Republicans for pushing it, for pushing impeachment. And then George W. Bush won in 2000 based off of basically restoring honor and integrity back to the White House. He ran against Bill Clinton’s image.

Max Bergmann:            If the Clinton case is the backlash example of pursuing an unjustified impeachment process and it only, the backlash is that minimal, losing five seats, having George W. Bush sneak through in the controversial election in 2000, okay. And then you look at the 1974 and if that’s the high-end, where we are, at the very least, with the Mueller investigation, why I think it’s a bigger scandal than Watergate, the political dynamics are different. We’re much more in the Watergate space than we are in the Clinton space. And I think if Democrats push this and pursued it and actually made this a big political issue, I think it would bear political fruit for them, but they’re very reticent to do so.

Max Bergmann:            And I think there’s a number of reasons for that that go beyond there’s a larger psychology here. Democrats don’t like to run a scandal. While the Republicans, their whole, what drives them when they run political campaigns is to search for political scandal, for Clinton emails, for some sort of Obama-ish scandal that they could make a big deal out of. The Democrats like to talk about policy and are very wonky in some ways lovable and sort of boring in that sense. And that’s, I think, really hurting them here.

Misha Zelinsky:             That’s an interesting point. The progressives don’t tend to dial up the outrage on those types of things, they like to make it about the issues. We’re often outraged about the issues but it’s a really valid point. The 2020 election is anyone talking about this to your mind? We just had the debates, do you think this is getting enough air time because there’s been significantly a pivot to perhaps the issues health education, etc. Do you think that this is getting enough air time or are the candidates still mind waiting to see what that House does and see if there’s a tailwind there?

Max Bergmann:            Well actually the Democratic political candidates have led on this. I think Elizabeth Warren, in particular, was the first major political figure to come out in favor of impeachment. She was then followed by a number of other Democratic presidential candidates. And most of the top-tier candidates have all come out calling for Donald Trump to be impeached and for the House to move to an impeachment inquiry. So I think they’ve actually led. The debates that occurred, I was sort of surprised that there weren’t more questions related to impeachment. There was one on the first night, not on the second, in that this hasn’t played a bigger role in the questioning.

Max Bergmann:            Some of that is because it’s a lot of the folks agree internally, but I am a little surprised it’s hasn’t been a bigger issue. I think it’s now been a few months since the Mueller report has dropped. It shows that how if you don’t react and if there’s no outrage, the outrage will decline over time, people’s attention spans are short especially with Donald Trump in the White House and there’s a scandal every 15 minutes. But we’re about to have a big thing happen in a couple weeks where Robert Mueller is going to testify, or is scheduled to testify, and I think that’s going to put this back into the news. I think it’s going to put more pressure on House Democrats. And what we’ve been seeing is this trickle of more and more House Democrats are coming out for impeachment. So the numbers are sort of ticking up and I think the big question is…

Max Bergmann:            August is sort of this mythical month actually in American politics where there’s no news, boring eras, like the 1990s, August will be dominated by news of shark attacks and other things. But it’s also a month that because it’s a limited new cycle there’s not much happening that one issue could sort of dominate and perhaps the one issue to dominate might be Russia, and I think that’s one of the big, the Russian investigation. In 2009, it was the Tea Party movement sort of developed then. Two years ago it was Charlottesville. It was Donald Trump’s racism dominated. So we’ll see what sort of drives the news in August. And if it drives the news, this investigation drives the news, I think you could see House members coming back from that long recess, having been home speaking to their constituents, and say okay, I can’t look my constituents in the eye and not move forward on this. We’ll see.

Misha Zelinsky:             You’re right, I think Mueller testifying will be interesting because in his report, as I understand it, he’s effectively said, you can’t indict a sitting president and the mechanism for that as you pointed out is an impeachment through the Constitution. So that case might come out and that evidence as well.

Misha Zelinsky:             We talked a lot about US, there are obviously other democracies in the world and quite a bit of interference, particularly in the European context. What sort of work are you doing looking at the level of Russian interference or foreign interference in the European elections or particularly in the Brexit election? How concerning is that, given that you talked about driving to those schisms that exist within societies?

Max Bergmann:            Been doing a significant amount of work looking into those. I think one of the things that when we think about, at least in the Russian case, Russian interference, is that they look to exploit the gaps that our domestic politics make available to them. In the United States there’s lots of gaps in terms of the financing of campaigns of money… And the Russians were able to identify those gaps. I think in the Brexit case, for example, we see a lot of the same similarities. So a lot of the things happening in the United States were happening in the UK.

Max Bergmann:            I think one of the things that’s most troubling about Brexit is that while we’ve had this two-year long investigation and discussion and focus on Russian interference that has resulted in the Mueller report, and the one thing the United States can firmly say is we know Russia interfered in the 2016 election. The one thing that you still cannot say about Brexit, or at least that is not accepted in UK politics, I think you can say it, but is not accepted as conventional wisdom in UK politics is that Russia interfered in the Brexit Referendum. And to me, there’s very little doubt that that occurred. And you just have to look at the way Aaron Banks, who is the main financier of one of the Leave campaigns, what we see is exactly the same thing that was happening with Donald Trump. Almost exactly at the same time.

Max Bergmann:            Donald Trump was being offered this Trump Tower in Moscow, this too good to be true business deal and at the same time he was then running for office in which, and Donald Trump was using his pro-Russian statements throughout the campaign as a way to advance his business deal that involved working with the Russian bank, involved coordinating with the Kremlin. And we see the same thing with Aaron Banks, where he essentially he’s being offered this too good to be true deal to take to run the merger of these gold mines in Russia, something that would be well beyond his depths. It would be incredibly lucrative. He’s having meetings with the UK and the Russian ambassador with in the UK. He’s in talks with a Russian bank and so you see very similar, a lot of similarities. You also see the Russian online social media arm, the Internet Research Agency didn’t just start operating in 2016. It started years before that. And Brexit would be something that the Russians would have definitely worked to promote. There’s a lot of digital, computer scientists that have looked at the Brexit referendum and have seen the same sorts of social media activity in the UK during that period that we saw in the United States.

Max Bergmann:            But the UK has not conducted a similar sort of investigation. And when they have, when the Parliament did, it found a lot of there there, referred Aaron Banks to the National Crime Agency, the FBI equivalent, and it raised a lot of questions about some of the digital campaigns, one being digital companies, Cambridge Analytica, who worked on the Trump campaign who is now out of business because of the practices that it used. And so, I think that is a particularly worrying case of lack of actual energy and resolve on behalf of British authorities to actually protect their politics from Russian interference.

Misha Zelinsky:             It would be a significant win for for Vladimir Putin and Russia to split apart the EU. That’s a foreign-policy aim of the Russian government.

Max Bergmann:            Yeah, I think particularly, one of the things that occurred, I think, after 2014 is pre-2014, so pre the Ukraine crisis, the EU was seen in Russia as a second-tier thing. NATO was the major focus. But what the Ukraine, the Maidan Revolution was about, which then resulted in the collapse of the pro-Russian, pro-Kremlin government of Viktor Yanukovych, It was about whether Ukraine was going to have an economic agreement with the EU. And Russia was offering an economic agreement with Russia, the Eurasian union as they described it. And Yanukovych decided to go with Russia. It led to mass protests in the streets, which then an occupation of Maidan Square, which lasted for months. And so here was a revolution started, essentially by EU bureaucrats, not realizing, basically, how far they were going and offering Association agreements with the EU. And the power of the EU that countries like Georgia and Ukraine wanted to be part of the European Union. They looked at countries like Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, their neighbors, that were part of the EU and said we want that.

Max Bergmann:            And so, think after 2014, you see a particular Russian focus on how do we undermine the European Union. One of the ways, you cultivate and you build up and you amplify the far right leaders of Europe and seek exits, Brexit. Brexit would totally be in Russian interests, but then you also see it in France with Marine Le Pen. This is probably a much clearer example Marine Le Pen’s National Front party was funded by a Czech Russian bank, they got around €10 million to operate. There was lots of online social media support from Marine Le Pen’s campaign and attacks against Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 election. And then, of course, what did the Russians do? They also hacked Macron’s campaign and released the emails a la the same thing we saw in 2016. And Marine Le Pen was running on an anti-EU, anti-NATO, pro-Russian platform.

Max Bergmann:            And we’re seeing it now in Italy with Matteo Salvini government where he’s potentially a recipient of millions of dollars from Russia, or at least his party is. And so the playbook is very straightforward. It’s the idea that you can corrupt politicians. And so why not corrupt Democratic politicians, especially those on the far right who, in fact, seem more corruptible than those on the left and seek to cultivate them and amplify them and try to promote their candidacies. It’s been particularly effective and I think it’s one thing that I think were seeing in Europe, one positive, is that there’s been a strong backlash actually against Brexit and so the EU seems, in some ways, more solid than it was a few years ago in 2016.

Misha Zelinsky:             One of the things you talked about and I think is relevant to basically all these issues that were having with foreign interference is this question of openness versus closed systems. Up until now, the theory’s been that openness wins liberalism wins markets, tends to win, democracy wins. As you said, they’re driving, foreign interference creates schisms in society. They’re already pre-existing but the openness And messiness of democracy and the openness of the media, the openness of social media, in particular, seems to now being a tool used against liberal democracies in the West and Europe and other parts of the world. And so how do democracies guard against that, that openness, without losing a sense of self?

Max Bergmann:            It’s a great question. I think it’s in some ways the question of our age. Now I think step one is to have a degree of confidence in the success of open systems. I think in some ways close systems are more afraid of us then we should be of them. There’s a reason why Vladimir Putin, in particular, is striking back at the West. It’s because he is incredibly nervous of a color revolution, of a liberal uprising happening within Russia. Why would that happen? It’s because Russian citizens decide they want to have more of a democratic society. They want to be more open, more like us. And so Putin needs to make, and I think China as well, democratic societies seem unattractive. And so, I think it’s one where we need to have a degree of confidence.

Max Bergmann:            The second thing is, I think we need to be aware of this challenge, of this threat, of the fact that we done all this business, we need to pivot, reassess that after the 1990s we assumed that if we opened our economies and opened our societies to autocratic governments it would change them, and it wouldn’t change us. And, to a degree, we were right. It has changed autocratic societies, but it hasn’t changed them to the degree we thought it would. In this glide path to democratization, I think we have to reassess. And in some ways it’s also changed us. So it doesn’t meet that we need to close off an autocratic societies, but I think we need to be more guarded. We need to have a real focus on transparency within our democratic politics, really focus on our rules and legislation, foreign interference, foreign registration, other areas where how do we make sure that yes, we can have foreigners here in our society, but they can’t covertly influence our politics. So that remains, I think, a critical challenge.

Max Bergmann:            I think the other larger aspect is that it means that we need to go back and look at our democratic allies and partners and value them much more and work together much more closely, look to have our economies of democratic societies linked together more closely. As opposed to having it be just generally open, we should focus on like-minded partners, democracies. And so, I think that is both a broader challenge in terms of… And also protecting ourselves in our political systems.

Max Bergmann:            And the third component is that I think we do need to go on offense a bit more. There does need to be a bit more of pushing public diplomacy of competing more with autocratic states, particularly in areas like the Balkans and areas in Asia and Africa where authoritarian countries are moving in, offering lots of resources, working to corrupt those countries and turn them away from liberal democracy. And we need to counter that.

Misha Zelinsky:             One of the other areas, and we talked a lot about safeguarding systems and making sure that the institutions themselves are safe, but I think one of the areas that we need to address as societies are the schisms that you’re seeing between rural and urban, between educated and uneducated, between the economic uplift that people are experiencing or not experiencing, these are relatively present in most advanced economies and advanced democratic societies. And I think there’s probably a need for us to address the schisms themselves. We can stop them from being exploited but the best way to stop them being exploited is to probably try to remove them as best we can. I’m sure you probably agree with that.

Max Bergmann:            Yeah, no I think that’s dead on. And I think one of the ways that foreign interference works is that it can tap into discontented populations within society. And it’s particularly problematic when a large portion of your democratic population is extremely discontent. A lot of the discontent is over the different economic inequalities, economic setbacks that have occurred, divergence between urban and rural areas I think is particularly something we see very strongly here in the United States. We used to talk about red states, blue states, but now it’s really blue cities, red country. The dynamic is very clear. And so part of that is because, and part of the resentment of globalization that were seeing, resentment of liberalism is that from rural areas where economic growth in the United States has flat-lined over the last 20 years and, in particular, were particularly hard-hit by the great recession. Cities like Washington DC have thrived, actually in the past 20 years and have become super expensive, have become plugged into the global economy, to the global intellectual architecture, the hub of ideas that are flowing around the world. And I think there’s a resentment of that and a willingness on the part of large parts of the population to vote for anyone that will change the system, that will break the system.

Max Bergmann:            So one immediate remedy for addressing foreign interference, and it’s complicated, but is to try to address that broader discontent. And if your public is not as discontent about the current situation, then democratic societies will thrive, you’ll create less space for foreign interference. And so I think that is a major focus, should be a major focus of policymakers. I think one good thing we’re seeing here in the Democratic political discussion is a lot of focus on that in a way that hasn’t actually occurred in modern memory.

Misha Zelinsky:             I completely agree. Democracy needs to deliver. It’s not purely just of voting process of itself. They need to deliver for people. If it delivers for people than the rest takes care of itself. The one thing I was curious to take you on, we talked a lot about Russia. There’s been an enormous focus from the administration on the question of China and the use of Huawei potentially moving liberal democracies and the concerns about its links to the Chinese Communist Party and whether or not… It’s a company in Australia that’s been banned from joining the 5G network. Do you see perhaps… Is China the main game when it comes to interference? We talk about it a lot in Australia. It’s tended to dominate the discourse a little bit in the US, but from a public policy point of view, how do you see the threat posed by the use of Huawei and the use of Chinese interference?

Max Bergmann:            I think it’s a really significant threat. I think it’s one where… Sometimes the Trump administration isn’t wrong. And the problem is we’re used to them just being wrong all the time that when they’re right it becomes a little bit… It can fall on deaf ears. But I think this is super problematic because if you control the broader telecommunications architecture of a democratic society and that’s being controlled by an autocratic government that has its own political designs and intentions, I think that the potential for abuse is huge. Now, we’ve worried in the past about Russians hacking into the communications links of sea cables under the sea, of satellites of intercepting all sorts of communication. And so if you basically allowed China to control your information technology backbone structure, I think you’re potentially exposing yourself, not just from a potential foreign interference, China’s potential ability to observe and monitor Australian society or whatever society they’re in, but in a national security contingency, in an event where there’s a conflict or if something were to happen, then you’re already compromised and how to combat that threat and challenge.

Max Bergmann:            And so I think one thing for countries to assess, especially if you’re Australia, is what is the potential contingency like? What side would you want to be on, and I hope that would be, I think as we see the new sort of geopolitics of the day, it’s clear that the US and China are, I think, hopefully will always avoid conflict, but they’re going to be two competitors and I think the alliance between the US and Australia, and I saw this at the end of the Obama administration, has sadly actually come to supplant the special relationship with the UK and its importance. That’s partly because of the UK’s own actions of austerity, of Brexit, but it’s also because Australia’s now pivotal role in a pivotal region. It’s also Australia’s partnership throughout the years with the United States. And I think part of that is our democratic values that are so closely aligned. We speak the same language, we have similar forms of government, we’re democracies. And I hope, and I think that is something that… So if Australia when it’s making a geopolitical decision here, sees that as the trend line to be with the United States or to make a choice, I don’t think China’s the right bet.

Max Bergmann:            Now it’s hard to make that case when we have Donald Trump in the White House, someone who, I think, is not quite an attractive figure and makes America, I think embarrasses the country a lot, but we are a democracy. We’ll have an election next year and hopefully, at least from my perspective that will pivot. I think having a Chinese company control something so vital is something to really be wary of.

Misha Zelinsky:             You’ve ended on an uplifting message there. And as one of my famous clunky sort of segues, you managed to bring it back to the Australian American alliance So I can pivot out of that to say, the last question I ask every guest, foreign guests, who are the three Australians that you might reluctantly, perhaps there’s not enough of us, but that you would bring to a barbecue at Max Bergmann’s place? I should give you up the fact that you were desperately googling famous Australians so I’m curious to see who you came up with in the top three Google searches?

Max Bergmann:            No, the problem is I got distracted. And I wasn’t really able to go through it. I think so… Famous Australians. Well I mean I think I would have to have dinner with the former Australian ambassador to the UK, Ambassador Downer, who met with Papadopoulos. So I think that’s a no-brainer given my role. I’m sort of friends with another Australian ambassador who used to be posted here in the United States who would also get me drunk quite frequently, but I won’t say his name because I don’t want to get him in trouble… So the famous Australian NBA player Bogarts would be one. And then, oh Tim Cahill of soccer, also played for the New York Red Bulls, who’s not my team, I’m a DC United supporter, but Tim Cahill seems like a great guy. So I think that’s, that’s three.

Misha Zelinsky:             Alexander downer, Tim Cahill, and Chris Bogut at and an unnamed ambassador who would be bringing the booze, I assume. So that sounds like a good barbecue.

Max Bergmann:            Yeah… Often times Americans are bad at dissecting American accents, often times from our movie stars were all be like that person’s not American? Or that person is not British? So I know there’s more Australians among us that should be brought to the dinner party.

Misha Zelinsky:             Will there’s a whole heap of Australians that are actually New Zealanders that we claim, like Russell Crowe. So there’s a whole system in place where if you become famous your Australian, if you’re notorious you become a Kiwi right?

Max Bergmann:            Yeah.

Misha Zelinsky:             Anyway, look thank you so much for joining the show, Max, it’s been a pleasure. And thank you for your time.

Max Bergmann:            Yeah, my pleasure, thanks for having me.

 

 

Ambassador Curtis Chin

Ambassador Curtis Chin served as the US ambassador to the Asian Development Bank.  In doing so, he became only the fourth US ambassador of Chinese heritage. As one of the world’s foremost experts on the Asia-Pacific region, Curtis now serves as the Asia Fellow of the nonpartisan Milken Institute and works with a range of startups and impact funds in Asia. Curtis joined Misha Zelinsky for a chat about the US-China trade war, what a deal looks like for both countries, the future of global trade and governance, and how the world should respond to countries that want to break the rules.

TRANSCRIPT

Misha Zelinsky:                  Curtis Chin, welcome to Diplomates. How are you?

Curtis Chin:                           Hey, doing well. Great to be with you.

Misha Zelinsky:                  And I should just reference for the audience, that we’re doing this through a web chat interface, so you’re currently in Bangkok, which is three hours behind Sydney time. So thank you for joining us. You’re an American in Thailand, but thank you for joining us as an international guest.

Curtis Chin:                           Delighted to be with you. I think though with so many of us, it’s one city one day, another city the next day, but very clearly, I spend most of time here in Asia, really Southeast Asia. And I’m with the Milken Institute out of Singapore, but yeah, from the US, but back and forth between the US and Asia-Pacific. So great to be with you today, chatting about Asia-Pacific, sharing some thoughts on Australia, the rest of the region, and some of the big stories of these weeks, and probably the whole year, which is the front and foremost, China and the US.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Yeah. I think that’s actually a good place to start. So you’re obviously an Asia-Pacific expert, you spend a lot of time in the Asian region. Big news at the moment, and certainly the last six to twelve months has been this question of trade, and certainly this trade tensions between China and the United States, and what increasingly now looking like a trade war. So I suppose the first question is, is this a trade war and what should the world make of the sort of these trade tensions between the United States and China?

Curtis Chin:                           First let me go back to your comment that I’m an expert, I don’t think there’s anyone that’s an expert in terms of what’s going on right now between the US and China. I mean, it really is unprecedented. You know, I was very lucky to serve primarily in Republican administrations, but I was lucky to serve also in the Obama administration as our US ambassador to the Asian Development Bank. And I’d say for a long time Republicans and Democrats … and no one’s really been a big fan of tariffs. So today we’re at a situation where back and forth, whether you call it a trade war, or let’s say a tariffs war, we’re seeing the United States and China continue to raise tariffs on each other’s products. For me in the short run, clearly not a good thing. In the long run my hope is that both sides will come up with a way that will lead to a more balanced, more sustainable relationship between China and the US.

Curtis Chin:                           But also if both sides succeed in moving this forward, it will be to the benefit of the entire region, of all of Asia-Pacific, including Australia. When you think about countries that in my view, have become so dependent on China as a source of purchases of their commodities, Australia comes to mind, but also as a place where you move supply chains because labor costs have been cheaper there. So you’ve seen this movement over the what? Last decades, but that needs to change. One, it’s already changing even before these tariffs back and forth, because the cost of production in China is getting more expensive. But also I could say quite frankly, that as we think about China’s behavior, what might have been acceptable two or three decades ago … I mean, clearly China was a poor country, is not acceptable today. Bluntly we might say it’s time for China to grow up and take on some of the responsibilities that come with being again, a great economic power.

Misha Zelinsky:                  It’s interesting you said there, you touched on that for a long time the bipartisan consensus in the United States, certainly globally too, is that free trade is good, tariffs are bad, interventionism is bad. What’s interesting is … I suppose firstly, and I’m keen to get your take on this, a lot of people will say that this is a Trump thing, but it’s actually, interestingly, perhaps the only thing that both sides of the United States, of the aisle politically agree on, which is that sometimes the war on trade is popular and bipartisan, because you saw Trump tweeting as he does, about tariffs that he’s going to put on, and being encouraged by the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, saying he was doing the right thing and to keep going. So it’s interesting the US in a very quick way, in a bipartisan way, to have a more assertive approach to Chinese trade in the United States. So I’m curious to get your take on what that journey is and how the United States has gotten itself to this point.

Curtis Chin:                           Well, you know I think your points, it’s clearly not just a Trump thing, I think President Trump to his great credit, has really captured kind of the moment, the feeling, the frustration of not just Americans, but people all around the world who have tried to engage with China. Clearly the world has benefited from less expensive products made in China because of traditionally what have been lower labor cost. And in may ways it was a gamble, with purchasing products from China, with making products in China, lead also to a more economically, politically liberal nation. That gamble has not paid off. We’re seeing a China today that is much more strict in term of how it treats its own people, in terms of its crackdowns on Christians and Muslims, in terms of its behavior on human rights. And it shouldn’t take away from the successes that China has achieved in lifting really, hundreds of millions out of poverty. But again, I think to one of my earlier points, China also has to evolve, China has to grow up.

Curtis Chin:                           And so Trump has in a way, come into this moment, really perhaps, he was the president for this moment, and even China in the past has said this trade imbalance between the United States and China is not sustainable, because ultimately it will lead to a pushback, and we’re seeing that, not just in the United States, but really throughout the Southeast Asia region in particular. Again, I’m based mainly in Southeast Asia, and when I speak to chairmen, CEOs, senior leadership of Southeast Asian businesses, you also find tremendous support, tremendous sympathy for the points that Donald Trump is making. I was out actually recently with the chairman of a Southeast Asian company, he stepped down as CEO from his role, and what he said to me was very interesting, he said that in many ways, they would all love to go on record and say what Trump is saying, but China has been a vindictive nation, that we’ve seen records recently, of where they’ve punished companies for doing things that went against China’s foreign policy.

Curtis Chin:                           One specific example would be South Korea. In South Korea, there’s a big conglomerate called Lotte, big South Korean company, respected company. The South Korean government, to protect its own people, made the decision to install kind of like a missile defense system. The land that was used was once owned by Lotte. So what happened? China sought to punish Lotte in terms of its business transactions in China. So just one very real example of how the Chinese government behaves against individual companies. President Trump to his great credit is saying, “We the United States will speak up on these issues,” because in many ways I think his language was, “China has been ripping off the US and too much of the world. We need to rebalance that.” And that rebalancing also will be to the benefit of China itself. I’m sure China is not happy with it being kind of like the country that’s increasingly kicked around in rhetoric not just in the US, but in public and in private, in parts of Asia.

Curtis Chin:                           That’s not good for China. China really should be embraced for what it has done in terms of lifting millions out of poverty, but its treatment of foreign businesses, both in China and outside of China really has to stop. And so where I would say that I think the Trump administration needs to evolve, is they’ve identified very clearly and spoken out very clearly on the issue, but I think they have to evolve in a way that also brings in their many natural allies to come together, to help China move forward in this situation.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Yeah. One of the things I’m curious about, Trump sort of is always promoting himself as the great deal maker, but the question of tariffs is obviously that it sort of punishes the country that’s taking their export for some sort of practice, but at the same time it obviously lifts prices for households. Now, a figure I saw was that if they end up putting up this 25% tariff on all Chinese imported goods into the United States, we’re talking about $2,500 a year per household increase in the cost of living. The thing I’m curious about is does this have implications for Trump in the domestic policy sense, and also to your mind, what does a deal look like? Trump focuses a lot on trade deficits, but what does a deal look, and what does victory look like in this situation, because the grievance is clear, but it’s not as clear one who wins, households in the United States get punished, and secondly what does a deal look like in the minds of Trump or other experts?

Curtis Chin:                           Yeah. A number of interesting points you raise. First, when you have tariffs … and I’m no fan of tariffs. Tariffs openly I hope, are means to a more balanced relationship between the United States and China. The other is that question, who pays for a tariff? So let’s say you’re selling a product, a tariff is imposed, one question will be, “Can that tariff be passed on to the end consumer?” Right, then of course the consumer will most ultimately pay. Will that company though first try to absorb it because they’re afraid of losing the business? It’s a little bit more complicated than what people say. But I also underscores, there are always winners and losers when it comes to tariffs. Another tricky point. We talk about the impact of tariffs on the American consumer, but I remember I did one interview where someone said to me, “But don’t you benefit from cheap products at Walmart?” Though again, it’s a big American store. Of course we do, but clearly I can only afford those cheap products if I have a job, and have I lost my job because of all those cheap products?

Curtis Chin:                           It’s really kind of a balance that we need to seek, and then likewise, when people raise the point of American consumers ultimately in the short term pay, I wonder if people will pose that same interpretation to China, or is it just China cares less about its consumers, and they’re thinking that the US will worry about its consumers but China will not, as it tit for tat, tries then tariffs the other way around? So I think we need to look at the individual winners and losers. I think the Chinese are now trying to target agricultural areas, big support areas for President Trump. As we think about the politics of trade also, President Trump of course, is running for reelection. Election is next year, next November. That’s a lot of months before that election, to get a deal done. So we’ll see how it plays out with this timing. Your second point, what will a deal look like?

Curtis Chin:                           My fear is that ultimately there will be a face-saving deal, where each side claims victory, but really nothing changes. And so that goes to you, what is success? For me success isn’t simply that Chinese buy a lot more US exports. Clearly that’s a short-term win. But it doesn’t address the longterm issue that many countries … maybe the US is at the forefront, but many countries are facing with regards to China, which is theft of intellectual property, which is forced technology transfers, which are non-tariff trade barriers. It’s a range of things that companies, whether they’re Australian, or American, or from somewhere in Southeast Asia are facing. For me a real success would be if some of these things change. You know there was some talk that actually, that the Chinese as part of the negotiation process, had agreed to some of this, because perhaps they saw that it was in their interest too.

Curtis Chin:                           On this war, who knows the backstory and all these reports and tweets? But then you saw, most recently, leading up to the latest announcement by President Trump, about really, a move to impose tariffs on all Chinese exports, was this point that China reneged, that China moved backwards in terms of edits on the agreement that the negotiators had already agreed to. So only the people involved will know the truth to that, but I can tell you as business person who’s worked in Beijing, who’s worked in Hong Kong, and now worked throughout Southeast Asia, business people from all kinds of companies, American, Australian and others, have seen that same reality, where something that you thought was negotiated with a Chinese counterpart, all of a sudden doesn’t seem so negotiated as the process moves forward. So I would not be surprised that there is quite a bit of truth to that comment, to that tweet from President Trump, “The Chinese reneged, the Chinese moved backwards.” And so again, that needs to change.

Curtis Chin:                           So again when we talk about what is victory, victory ideally is a victory for both sides. That both sides, China and the United States, to go back to their really important domestic constituencies, and say “We’ve come to an agreement, we moved these things forward.” But then ultimately that victory will be a more sustained trading relationship between the United States and China. One of the point I always want to make though, is that we looked at some of the drivers of where we are today. Clearly for decades the Chinese have in a way, been gaming the system, taking advantage of the system, something that might have been tolerated when they really were a much poorer nation and a less militaristic nation than they are today. So that has to evolve. But I think one thing that we need to think more about more, and hopefully media can talk about more, is that in the world today, exports are both of goods and services.

Curtis Chin:                           So we talk a lot about things that were made, or grown, and exported, but we also need to think about the services. United States, developing nations, are also trying to move this way, but the United States has moved to develop the economy, where a lot of things we produce are services, are intellectual property, are things that again, are of great value, of greater value added than something simple that might have been made 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. As we talk about the balance between nations in terms of what they import or export, I think we should ideally spend also more time talking about both goods and services, versus the focus on the easy number to understand, which is how many widgets or bushels of this has a nation purchased. Out of all this I think back about our evolving sense of trade, of Asia. Ultimately, and I say to people, “Things have moved forward, it’s a positive thing. Trade has been a wonderful thing.”

Curtis Chin:                           But the reality also is that in this more globalized world, this globalized economy of ours, many people have not done so well. So Trump has captured that moment, and spoken to people about what can he do to fight for them. But I see that across this world of ours, and across Europe, but very much across here and Asia, where in the Philippines, they had a recent election also, a very populist leader, India is going to an election, Indonesian had its own election, where leaders have to respond to their vast number of citizens who maybe don’t see that they’ve become better off as part of this globalized economy.

Misha Zelinsky:                  And we’ve certainly seen that with Brexit as well. I think you’re right. I mean, the question of trade and who benefits, and it might … it looks good in a headline number, but often say trade destroys and distributes unevenly. And I think there’s a lot of people that have been left behind or dislocated, and it’s expressing itself in this politics in a worrying sort of way. So I think certainly a lot to think about there for policymakers. One thing I’m curious about is, and you sort of talked a lot about the trade relationship, that seems to me now that the United States very much considers itself or it sees China now as very much a strategic competitor.

Curtis Chin:                           I think in every US administration, every country around the world, even your government hopefully, is working to give its citizens a better life. And so I think what we’ve seen is this continuing movement to a richer world, but also a more unequal world. And so you’ve seen so much talk about inequality kind of bubbling up over these last, really two decades, and I think we’ve reached that point where people are trying to look for what are the drivers of this inequality, how do we address that? And so very clearly, the two biggest economies in the world, China and the US, ought to be very much part of that conversation. You raised an intriguing question when you talk about China and the US, China versus the US. For me taking a step back, in many ways I see things also as not just China versus the US, but a US-driven system versus an alternative that China is pushing when it comes to concepts of competition, economics, of trade, and governance.

Curtis Chin:                           In general, I think no country wants to chose and say, “I’m on the US’s side or on the China side,” but I would say to nations, I would say to the people of Australia and elsewhere, “It really it’s up to you to decide which system is better for your own people.” For me, clearly I’m biased, I am for a system of free markets, free trade, and free speech. This is not what China is for, right? But often people will say, “But I got to follow the money, I got to pay the bills, I got to do what I need to do. It’s China that is the big customer.” And so that’s what people think to think through. It’s a very difficult question sometimes. I spoke recently at a Bloomberg event in Singapore on this whole same issue of China and the US, and I was struck by one of our fellow panelist, a friend … he’s actually from the Democrat side versus Republican side, but clearly we’re both Americans. Kirk Wagar, the former US ambassador to Singapore.

Curtis Chin:                           It was very interesting when he made a comment, and that comment was basically, “Western businesses, when they deal with China, the big question for them is, ‘Do you have to sell your soul, or to what degree do you sell your soul?’” So I’m paraphrasing his comment, but that’s that challenge of you’re going to make so much money hopefully dealing with China, the reality is many companies lose money dealing with China. But in pursuit of that market, or in Pursuit of that cheaper production base, do you simply look the other way on all the terrible things that China is doing? Maybe case number one, we see these days are these reports coming out of Xinjiang, this Northwest part of China, of where they put, by some accounts, one million to two million people into camps. Some would say concentration camps, of all the terrible connotations that raises from World War II. But they put people there simply because they’re Muslim.

Curtis Chin:                           That clearly, I would hope the world would speak out about. But we’ve seen how Muslim nations, many nations have looked the other way. “It’s China’s right,” I think one Saudi leader said, “as to how they deal with what China perceives as a terrorism threat.” But for me, maybe I’m not getting any business in the near term in China, because I want to speak up on behalf of all Chinese people, whether they’re Muslim, or Tibetan, or Han Chinese. You know I’m ethnic. People can’t see me on your podcast, but I think my great-grandfather went to the US way back in the late 1880s to help build the railways or something. I’m ethnic Chinese, but for me it shouldn’t be about your ethnicity, really even your nationality, but people should willing speak up on behalf of those that really need speaking up on behalf. So clearly the Muslims, the Tibetans, but even Christians. We’re seeing reports that the Chinese have been particularly aggressive in tearing down Christian churches, which they don’t recognize. These are all not great things.

Curtis Chin:                           But what if you want to do business in China? Do you say nothing because you’re going to make some money? That’s a very difficult question for people who again, who have to pay the bills. But for me, you can’t, in my mind, simply chose to say nothing because you want the money. There is some balance and each individual, each company needs to think through what is that … and in the long run, my hope is that all Chinese people will appreciate this notion that every single individual has value. There I go sounding like an American.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Well, that’s okay. It’s good to be of your people. But it’s so curious, you were touching quite a bit there about the rule of law, I think largely, I mean. And the United States is larger] since World War II certainly, in this so-called rules-based global order. China’s really bumping up against that now, and one of the things I’m sort of curious to take on, I mean, where are the areas that you think that the United States is prepared to turn the other way? So for example, if you take South China Sea where Barack Obama, President Obama sort of didn’t do a great deal as the Chinese government sort of constructed these artificial islands in the South China sea, and then militarizes on, has in effect sort of annexed a part of the South China sea.

Misha Zelinsky:                  How do you see things of that nature when it comes to getting the Chinese government to obey and respect maritime law in that instance, where the international courts very clearly ruled against China, and it essentially ignored them? How do make your earlier point that China, and they need to be a responsible grown up actor? How do you actually enforce that with the Chinese government?

Curtis Chin:                           I think the reality here, even when I go back thinking about that question you asked, the reality is it cannot just be China and the US deciding. What are the regional bodies, global bodies that can play really, a shaping role? I mean, the reality is that at the end of the day, and sadly this goes back to a statement, even when you think about Chinese history that, “Power grows out of a barrel of a gun,” Mao famously said in the civil war in China. And the reality is that when you look at some our regional institutions like ASEAN the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, they act by consensus. Many of those nations have a stake in the South China Sea, and the Philippines even calls it the West Philippines Sea, but China has been very aggressive in building up … I don’t know, we call them [islandets00:25:55], or little islands, or fake islands, I don’t know. And then despite saying they wouldn’t, moving into to militarize them.

Curtis Chin:                           But China’s got the guns, and maybe other countries don’t have the guns, or they want Chinese investment. So lets deal with that. But to your point, I would hope that a nation let’s say like Australia, can step up. It’s what we call like freedom of the seas, freedom of navigation, trips to the South China Sea. That nations throughout the region can seek to come together to engage with China. The Chinese strategy has always been one of like picking off countries, some would argue that ASEAN already has in a way, been nullified because China has bought out Laos and Cambodia. And for a associations that acts by consensus, if Cambodia has in the past said, “Well, no, no. We’re not going to issue a joint statement because we Cambodia, don’t agree,” it blocks efforts. So hopefully that will evolve and all. Your question also raised this point about systems, and organizations, and governance.

Curtis Chin:                           One I know very well, is this whole issue of how will we support and fill the financing gap? How will we support the building of infrastructure in the region when there’s been a big gap? The region’s infrastructure needs and how they will be financed. So four years, nearly two under Obama, nearly two under Bush, I served as our US ambassador to the Asian Development Bank. For those who don’t know, that’s kind of like an Asia-Pacific base, Philippines headquartered version of the World Bank, primarily focused on ending poverty in this region, mainly through building infrastructure, a lot of core infrastructure, roads, power, water systems, sanitation. Really doing good things there. But how do you build those infrastructure projects? So World Bank, Asian Development Bank, they’re all in this region. For the last couple of years we’ve seen Chinese rivals.

Curtis Chin:                           And so we’ve first and foremost seen the rise of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. We’ve seen something called the New Development Bank, some people call it the BRICS bank after Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the key players there. That one’s based out of Shanghai. We’re see moves by bilateral financial institutions like the Chinese development banks, or that will be just working with one country, versus these multilateral banks. We’re seeing a lot of new players challenging that old, what they call this old Bretton Woods type institutions to finance and move Asia forward. In many ways that’s a good thing, hopefully it makes some of those old bodies, like my old colleagues at the ADB, a little bit more hungry, innovative, focused on acting quicker to serve the needs of this region. But it’s a bad thing if what it is, it’s also a push to the bottom, who will get the money out the fastest. When I was on the board of the Asian Development Bank, I visited a nation whose engagement with the ministry of finance, is they seek to get funding for key infrastructure projects.

Curtis Chin:                           ADB, I think to its great credit, like the World Bank and others, we’ll try to push for certain, what we call safeguards, so that if you put in an infrastructure project, the environment would be in some ways be protected. There’d be … the lingo today is ESG, so there’d be like environmental, social, governance safeguards put in place. These are all good things, but then it makes a project take a little bit longer to develop. So if you’re a country just in search of financing, what if all of a sudden there are Chinese-backed banks? There’s nothing else. “We don’t care about those ESG, those safeguard standards, we trust you as the borrowing country to decide what’s right for your own people.” You can see there will be sympathy for that, “You decide what’s right for your own country in term of protecting the environment based on your own spot in that kind of development line.” But then the Chinese might say, “But if we do the financing for you, maybe Chinese state-owned enterprises were going to do a lot of the work, maybe it will come with 500 to 1,000 Chinese employees and workers.”

Curtis Chin:                           So I think any nation, they decide. It’s their money, they ultimately have to pay it back, but read the fine print. So don’t think that because maybe the Chinese aren’t insisting on certain safeguards that others might, that it doesn’t come with other things that they might well insist upon. And so that’s how it should be. As long as it’s transparent, these institutions are accountable, that’s how it should be. Let the market compete. What the big problem is though, and we’re beginning to see it even in China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, this is a big infrastructure funding push, is that what if decisions aren’t made fairly? What if corruption is involved? What if money changes hands? And case in point has been what we’ve seen has happened in Malaysia. In the last year or so, Malaysia brought back its longtime prime minister, probably the oldest prime minister in the world, Mahathir came back in with … was swept his party back into government, overturning the rule of, I think for decades, of what is not the opposition party.

Curtis Chin:                           And when Mahathir came back in as leader of Malaysia, he raised questions, it certainly raised eyebrows in China, but he raised question about some of the big infrastructure deals that were signed by his predecessor Najib, with the Chinese government. And to his great credit, forced renegotiation. And so one that’s come up most recently is … I think is calling it like an East Rail, a project … Really so much money in his huge infrastructure projects. Mahathir was ultimately able to shave the cost of the product or project. Not exactly apples and oranges because the project did change somewhat, but shaved the cost of that project by a third. And so it makes you wonder where was that extra third, you were talking really tens of millions of dollars, where was that money going? Into Chinese pockets? Into construction company pockets? Into Malaysian pockets? And then a question for the region, for countries that haven’t had this kind of democratic revolution bringing back an old prime minister, focused now on corruption.

Curtis Chin:                           What about all of those countries with deals other than the One Belt, One Road initiative, that haven’t had a Mahathir, to try to renegotiate and bring those costs down by a third? Where has that money gone? And so these are some of the questions that I think individual citizens may well raise when they see deals signed with China. But sadly in so many nations, those citizens are ignored, because the deal is done with leaders, and those leaders know for good and for bad, where that money has gone or will be going. So yes, China can be a constructive force in this region, but for that to happen in this changing world of ours, China too must evolve. And so bringing this all kind of full circle to how we began talking about China and the US, clearly we see this rivalry between the Chinese and the US government at this time. Hopefully it’s not a rivalry between the peoples of these nations, where people just want a better life for themselves.

Curtis Chin:                           But it’s also a rivalry, I believe, between different systems. So this Chinese system is one again, of subsidizing their own companies. To what degree is that acceptable or should it be acceptable, and then how do you have a level playing field when you’re up against a state-owned enterprise that’s completely subsidized by the second largest economy in the world? And I think these are important questions, that again are just not US versus China questions, and hopefully they’re questions that are also being asked within China. But we’re seeing now in some of the reports that are coming out of China, few and far between, where China itself is cracking down on its own Chinese economists and their own people who would dare challenge what Xi Jinping is pushing through right now. As I think a Chinese American, as somewhat Asian American, someone who’s living in both the US and Asia, I in particular want China to move forward and to succeed just like every other nation, but China must evolve, and my hope is that it’ll be done peacefully versus all the turmoil that China has gone through this last century.

Curtis Chin:                           My hope is that that does not come back. In a weird way, that may be what Xi Jinping fears, but is he putting in place a system which might encourage or increase the odds of that coming back. A case in point, Xi Jinping, president of China, pushed through a way for him to serve as really president for life. So in a way governance has moved backwards in China. Xi Jinping has a lot of rivals within China that maybe aren’t so happy with how he’s done things. This US-China back and forth, this trade war really emerged under his watch. So there’s a lot of questions within China about he’s doing things, but those people are increasingly kind of squashed. In the old days, if you were a senior Chinese leader, maybe you’d wait out whoever the president was, you’d wait five years, you’d wait 10 years, but that has now changed. Maybe there is no waiting out Xi Jinping.

Curtis Chin:                           And so are people moving sadly, back to that old system? Are they trying to bring him down, stab him in the back? Things that are not good, because that’s how China has evolved. It’s evolved backwards, and it’s gone back to the system where actually it’s almost like there’s a new emperor in town, that emperor is Xi Jinping. And what happened to emperors in the past? They either died or were overthrown. So that’s not a good thing for China, and I think no one should welcome turmoil in China. And so again it’s in China’s own interest to rethink about how it treats not just the US, but how it treats all its neighbors. The Chinese version of rule of law is not one that I would hope the world seeks to emulate. We look right now at an imprisoned … out on parole I think, the technical term is, but an imprisoned Huawei, this big Chinese tech company CFO in Canada under the Canadian version of rule of law.

Curtis Chin:                           I think that Huawei executive has just moved from one of her multimillion dollar houses in Vancouver to another multimillion dollar house in Vancouver while she goes through the Canadian legal process as will she be extradited to the United States regarding charges of was she really directly involved in her company’s trying to avoid sanctions on Iran, create shell companies, all these things. Right? So the rule of law is proceeding. Meanwhile in China, and I dare say it’s not coincidentally, but connected, China has retried one Canadian, I think sentenced him to death. China is now putting I think two Canadian citizens under arrest, alleging that they’re spies. There was one, I think social media post, that’s never all …. as you know never sure how accurate some of these posts are, but this particular social media post contrasted the treatment of those Canadians under the Chinese version of the rule of law, versus the Huawei CFO, her name is Meng, CFO Meng, among under the Canadian rule of law.

Curtis Chin:                           And so I say to countries, I say to people, “As you think about the systems that are really contending now, a Chinese way of doing things, a Western way of things, what is better for you?” And so my hope is that this notion of East versus West isn’t one of really of East versus West, it’s really what’s right for a nation. And as I think about even one person … I did an interview when someone said to me on air, “Well, isn’t this stealing of property by the Chinese cultural?” And I had to push back, one because I’m ethnic Chinese. But when you think about what does that mean, culture, because very clearly when I go to a dynamic place like Singapore, or a dynamic place like Hong Kong, or Taiwan, mainly Chinese people, ethnic Han Chinese people, I don’t see them ripping off and stealing other countries’ or other companies’, other countries companies’ intellectual property like you do in China.

Curtis Chin:                           So if it’s cultural, it’s because of a business climate that the communist Chinese have created, it’s not because people are ethnic Chinese or Caucasian or whatever. And I think that’s how we need to look at things in order to move things forward. And again, I keep coming to this point that moving things forward are also in the interest of the Chinese people. And so it’s always intriguing where people say that, “How long will you as a citizens stand for tariffs?” If indeed those higher costs are passed on to them. But then we can throw that same question at the Chinese, how often will Chinese citizens stomach and tolerate all that their leaders do, then impose this higher cost and burdens on them, whether it’s the money they spend, the lives they live, or what they can say? And unlike in a democracy, where the Chinese citizens say, “No, we want to change things. We’ll have different leaders,” how do people change things in China? Their track record has not been good when it’s been a system where the Chinese people have no way to peacefully speak up. And that’s the challenge for our world today.

Misha Zelinsky:                  So the question I have … So you sort of talked a lot about this sort of the competing models and the hope that I suppose, over time the theory always was that China would gradually adopt Western norms of global leadership and rules-based order. The thing that is curious in all this is that the United States has always been the underwriter of these systems and has always had great confidence in these systems. One of the great strengths of the United States model of global leadership has been its alliance system. Now, people have thought about Trump’s approach to the strategic rivalry with China, but one of the things I’d like input is Trump’s administration approach to United States’ friends in a way that has attacked NATO allies, it has attacked allies in Asia region, such as South Korea for not pulling their weight, etc. How can the United States’ friend believe in the system that United States has underpinned and expect China to adopt a system that perhaps the United States itself seems to be walking away from somewhat.

Curtis Chin:                           I don’t know if the answer is walking from a system that we’ve all benefited from, this global trading system, but very clearly, the United States is saying it needs to be change and fixed. One case and point I look at is think about all these global bodies, and that’s where my hope … We talk about West versus East, but I hope some of these global bodies are really seen as global bodies, because I think part of the challenge is we say it’s a Western system or, “I’m from the East. I don’t want that system.” But I would argue that things like human rights, free speech, worship whatever you want, your religion, or whatever your faith is, isn’t a Western concept, but then I hope would be more universal concepts. So going back to your point, so one of the institutions that I think needs to evolve, one example would be the World Trade Organization, and I think even the WTO leadership has said, “Yeah. We need to change too.” And it’s the Trump administration that is pushing for some of these changes.

Curtis Chin:                           One example would be under WTO rules right now, that China is still treated as a developing nation. So maybe it’s allowed to do certain things, can it have more state-owned enterprises, more support for state-owned enterprises, but then a developed nation can’t? So doesn’t that need to change? For me it’s kind of ridiculous also that this second largest economy in the world that is China, some would say largest economy based on purchasing power parity, that this nation still borrows money from the World Bank, still borrows money from the Asian Development Bank, because they say, “Oh, we’re a poor country.” So again it goes back I think, to these metrics, but very clearly, China has resources that other nations do not have. China again, amazing, has put like this little rover on I think, the far side of the moon, and yet it still borrows money from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank because it says, “Oh, we’re a poor country, we need these subsidized loans to help us fight poverty.”

Curtis Chin:                           And so I think these institutions need to change, WTO, ADB, World Bank, and how they treat a nation like China. And what’s great about these rules-based organizations also, it would be that, it’s not just about China. If it were another nation in that same kind of role as they move up, they also should in a sense, graduate from these kinds of assistance like grants and subsidized loans. And so I think, we think about this China and the US, I think that’s part of the challenge that right now because of this tariffs war, it’s seen as China versus the US. But in many ways, there will be many allies in the battle if they could speak freely, and also many more allies in a sense, if the Trump administration to your point, I think were more adept in how it handles its long time allies and friends. The US relationship with Australia, with Thailand, with Singapore, with the Philippines, these are relationships that will continue to evolve, but really are foundations for moving things forward in a way that will I think, benefit the countries involved, but also benefit this region, this Indo-Pacific region as well as the world.

Misha Zelinsky:                  So one question I want to ask you, are you a member or do you have an involvement in the International Republican Institute, the IRI which is responsible for promoting democracy globally? There’s a sister organization to Democrats version of them. Traditionally people have always thought that China would grow rich and then it would grow democratic. What we’ve seen as it’s grown richer, unfortunately it’s become more autocratic. You touched on the fact that Xi has made himself emperor for life. With your sort of background in what makes democracy great and how democracies flourish, do you hold any sort of hope … is there anything to hope for people that want to see China become more democratic, or is that just a lost hope now to your mind?

Curtis Chin:                           Are both the International Republican Institute and this National Democratic Institute, they’re both come under this umbrella, National Endowment for Democracy, which really comes out of … started to work way back when I began my career, like an intern under Ronald Reagan. But something that Ronald Reagan sought to encourage, was the spread of democracy. So these are nonpartisan groups, even though one sounds Republican one sounds Democrat. And their job really is to encourage democracy, but I think more importantly and this goes to the heart of your question, to encourage institutions, and systems, and processes that allow democracy to flourish. I’m usually always like the most hopeful person in the room, even though like the room’s falling apart. And so I’m always hopeful that things will be moving forward. But I think it’s important that we talk about democracy, that we realize that democracy is not just elections, democracy is about balance, it’s about systems, checks and balances, it’s about institutions.

Curtis Chin:                           And so like the work of both IRI, NDI, would be things like encouraging political parties, it doesn’t matter which party you are, but encouraging political parties to think through the use of research, degree that is allowed or easily done in a given country, so that they can better understand what citizens are worried about, what they’re concerned about, and then think through how they can best address those concerns. It’s about how do you strengthen a democratic process? Where people don’t like whoever is running, there’s a chance to get rid of that person. So yes, I’m hopeful for China in the long run, but clearly what we see in these last what? Five years, is a China that’s become much more economically assertive and militarily aggressive in the Indo-Pacific region. And so what will happen over time? The reality is that it won’t just be China and the US contending, it will be the other rising powers in this increasing … what they call multipolar world.

Curtis Chin:                           They will also have to contend with a rising China. One day we’ll see India come into its own, we will see Indonesia, the largest economy in Southeast Asia come into its own. How will China engage with an India, with an Indonesia, with a stronger ASEAN, Association of Southeast Asia Nations? How will they deal with this? Probably one of their biggest headaches is their friend, North Korea. At the end of the day, I believe, here I’m being hopeful again, I believe that Korea will be united one day, but clearly when it unites, the reality will most likely be a democratic, in a way, westward-oriented democracy, versus the model that China and North Korea itself now present to the world. That’s really what holds back these two nations from coming together, North Korea and South Korea, is China. China would probably prefer kind of a somewhat unstable North Korea on it’s border than a united westward-looking Korea.

Curtis Chin:                           And so China has a lot of headaches to contend with, this trade war is really just one of them. And as you think about the calendar of this year, China has so many worries to contend with. An anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen, I say massacre, Chinese doesn’t like that word, incident, I would say. But when we think about the June 4 anniversary coming up, when you think about labor unrest in China, Xi Jinping is in a difficult situation, and maybe in some ways much less secure and stable than he would like the world to think he is. And so this trade war at a time of an already slowing but still growing Chinese economy, is not good for him either. And so maybe he will pursue the route of again, trying to unite the Chinese people in a very nationalistic way. You’re seeing some of the rhetoric coming out of China, “China will never back down.” Very nationalistic, trying to unite his own people against an enemy, when the reality that maybe his biggest challenge is what’s happening at home, in his country.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Thanks. I could probably talk to you about this all day I think, it’s so may fascinating different areas we could go to, but of course you’re a busy man, you’ve got things to do. So as I always do, very clunkily segue to the fun part of the show. I get a lot of good feedback on this really lame question that I ask everyone. But of course you’re an American guest on our show, just curious about the three Australians that are coming to Ambassador Curtis Chin’s barbecue and why? And I should disclose, earlier he said, “What if I can’t think of three Australians?” I said, “Well, just do your best.”

Curtis Chin:                           Yeah. What if I can’t think of three Australian? But yeah, I kind of laughed when you asked me that question earlier, because in the United States when we think of Australians, they’re like people we’ve taken from Australia like Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, but I think … wasn’t Keith actually born in New Zealand? But again, I think they live in Tennessee right now. So I’m going to cheat and only give you two, but because they live in Tennessee, I bet they have some of the best barbecue in the United States. So I’d certainly love to have them because then maybe we wouldn’t talk politics, or we wouldn’t talk about China and the US, and we’d just have a great time …

Misha Zelinsky:                  Well, it’s funny you should say that …

Curtis Chin:                           … and enjoy American-Australia hospitality.

Misha Zelinsky:                  It’s funny you should say talking about Americans stealing Australians, because Australia is very famous for stealing New Zealanders like Russell Crowe. So it’s sort of … it’s all just [crosstalk 00:52:52].

Curtis Chin:                           That’s right. I think Keith Urban, I think he’s really a New Zealander. I don’t know what he is, but …

Misha Zelinsky:                  I’m not sure, but that’s a cute …

Curtis Chin:                           Nicole Kidman is Australian for sure …

Misha Zelinsky:                  She’s absolutely Aussie.

Curtis Chin:                           … and maybe they both Americans, I don’t know. But let me close by just saying that US-Australian relationship is a great one, it’s a solid one. I think United States, we can learn from Australia. I mean, look at your economy, you haven’t had a recession in a long time. A lot though has been driven by China, and so also how will Australia deal with this evolving economic world. Australia also, I think for a while, kept changing its prime ministers, I don’t know. It seems like there was a new one all the time, but maybe that’s also a broader point for all of us, that no matter who’s in charge things will be okay if we leave it to our people to run things, just American, Australia, Chinese whoever. They just want to move things forward, but maybe it’s the politics that gets in the way of everything. And sometimes when government does nothing, maybe things just move on forward.

Misha Zelinsky:                  A very positive message of hope to finish on there, Curtis. Thank you so much for joining Diplomates, mate.

Curtis Chin:                           All right, my pleasure. Take care.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Take care, mate.

Steve Glickman

Steve Glickman, the CEO and founder of Develop Advisors, is the world’s foremost expert on Economic Opportunity Zones. Steve joined Misha to give his predictions on the mid-term and 2020 elections, discuss solutions to geographic inequality, dissect the problems with a UBI and explain what’s gone wrong with global trade. Steve also gives tips on how to overcome partisanship in the legislative process.  It’s a BIG chat.  

A young gun in US politics, Steve was an advisor in the Obama Whitehouse and started his career as Special Assistant US Attorney. 

While at the Economic Innovation Group  – which he co-founded with Sean Parker – Steve developed the radical ‘Economic Opportunity Zones’ that are tasked with kickstarting capital investment and job creation in areas of the US suffering from high inequality and low capital investment. He is now bringing EOZ’s to life via his new investment firm, Develop Advisors. 

It’s a great and really fun chat. For policy nerds, there’s a really fascinating critique of the Universal Basic Income.

We need this guy to run for President some day (no pressure, Steve).

 

 

EPISODE 2 FULL TRANSCRIPT: 

Misha Zelinsky:                  Steve Glickman, how are you? Welcome.

Steve Glickman:                 Thanks for having me.

Misha Zelinsky:                  I should say that it’s in the evening in DC right now. Is that right?

Steve Glickman:                 Yeah. It’s 5:40. So all the government bureaucrats have already gone home

Misha Zelinsky:                  Very good. So I should say we’re obviously recording this across time zone. So it’s early in the morning here in Australia. But yeah, the wonders of technology bringing people together. So Steve, I was actually just going through your CV before. You and I first met through the American-Australian leadership dialogue where youth delegates. I’m a little bit surprised at the depth of your CV. Are you sure that you actually youth delegate or are you fudging things a little?

Steve Glickman:                 Well, you know, I make up most of the stuff that I do or talk about on the spot so you can pretty much assume it’s all one big running lie.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Well, just on that. So your main role, and we’ll talk a little bit about your broad career as we go along. But your main role is that to you are the co founder and CEO of the Economic Innovation Group. I was hoping that you might be able to tell us a little bit about what the EIG is and how and why it was set up.

Steve Glickman:                 Yeah. I think a good way to think about us is we’re social entrepreneurs. So we are trying to find a new pathway at addressing big economic challenges in a very crowded marketplace of think tanks and political organizations, and other groups that are trying to make their mark in DC. We were founded in early 2013. It was really, much of this was the brainchild of Sean Parker, who as you know is the co-founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook. And when he and I got connected at the end of 2012, early 2013, he was really focused on how you leverage the private sector to solve big economic challenges. Particularly, how you drive more private sector investors to a bigger part of country.

Steve Glickman:                 And that was really our DNA from the beginning was could we get a group of Democrats and Republicans, conservative and liberal thinkers, private sector, public sector actors to really come together around the notion that we could create a new incentive system to change the flow of capital markets in the US?

Steve Glickman:                 And as we started unpacking that problem and that approach, we found ourselves doing a lot of research around what drives inequality on a community level around America, and what the depths are of that inequality and what the impact is. And the more and more we unraveled that onion, the more questions we had and the more we realized that we think we had stumbled upon maybe the most important economic policy challenge that wasn’t really being addressed by either political party and that gave us a pretty strong feeling that we were onto something meaningful. So we’re really intensely focused just around that problem, and bringing in a whole new set of actors from the private sector to solve it.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Yeah, that’s really interesting. So we’ll talk a little bit about the bipartisan part of the EIG. But I’m just curious. I mean, I think a lot of people talking about inequality. I think what’s interesting about what the EIG does is that you are very focused on can I say, in an American sort of way, is that it’s focused on capital investment and enterprise. I was wondering if you could maybe just unpack that a little around how you see the role of enterprise in lifting people up out of inequality and rather than it being perhaps a government led solution.

Steve Glickman:                 I think our approach to it is that it involves both, but that the government at all levels. Whether it’s the federal government or local governments in the US, which is unique to the US structure that we’ve got that federalist system. That a lot of the programs initiated by government having worked very well, but even more importantly, it’s both politically, financially, they’re broke. There’s just no capital based on the changes in our tax system and the changes in the political acceptability of big government programs to do a lot more out of the public sector. And some of that’s just a factor of the economy and our debt, and the fact that between social security and Medicare, and defense spending, and payments of the debt, there’s just not a lot of additional capital to go around unless you hike up taxes.

Steve Glickman:                 And certainly in America, the political trends are in the opposite direction where you’ve been lowering taxes, or have had pretty low taxes for 30 or 40 years. So if you, go ahead.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Sorry, keep going.

Steve Glickman:                 So if you’re gonna solve the problem of how you create more economic growth, it costs money from somewhere. And the private sector is to contrast to all those trends in the public sector has never been wealthier, more profitable. The stock market’s never been higher than ever before. So clearly there’s a lot of capital that’s resting there. From our standpoint, the capital markets aren’t broke, they’re just broken. And they’re not working in the way that they could or should work. And if you’re not driving more capital places, you’re not ultimately creating more businesses places. And if you’re not creating more businesses places, there’s no other way to get jobs. So we subscribe to the notion that to change economies, it starts with the ground up. You have to create local, homegrown businesses and you can’t do that without capital.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Now, that’s really interesting. And I think you talked a lot about tax cuts there. And tax cuts at the moment, corporate tax cuts are on the agenda in Australia in a very contentious. There’s a lot of argument from both sides of politics. I think what was interesting, obviously those are major tax cut I’m brought in by the Trump administration and the republican congress. But what was within that was a small piece of a very innovative policy that the EIG championed. I was wondering if you could maybe tell us a little bit about the role that the tax cuts have played in helping the EIG actually get some rubber on the road in terms of things you just talked about.

Steve Glickman:                 Well, so the program you’re talking about is called opportunity zones. And let me separate it out a little bit from the overall tax reform package. It was a vehicle to make a certain set of tax changes, but I think it’s a little bit different in the tenure of what you see from many other parts of that tax reform package. It’s designed to do something that the US tax code has done for a long time, which is if you want to incentivize certain types of behavior, and in our case it was incentivizing moving private capital to low income parts of the country. The tax code is the most important and most powerful, most systemic way to do that. And of course we do that in the US to stimulate a charitable contributions. We do it to stimulate people buy houses, we do it to stimulate companies to make investments in research and development. We do it to stimulate the clean energy economy.

Steve Glickman:                 So it makes total sense and if you think, and we do think that community level inequality using most important problem to solve and there’s lots of capital in the private sector. Let’s utilize the tax code to systemically change the flows of that capital. And that’s basically what the opportunity zone program does. It’s essentially a deal between the federal government and private investors that we as the federal government will give you some level of tax forgiveness if you’re willing to make longterm and economically productive private investments in communities that are cut off from capital markets.

Steve Glickman:                 The program is obviously more complicated than that and we can get into whatever level of details you want, but at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. It’s about getting capital off the sidelines. By our calculation there’s about 6 trillion with a T, $6 trillion in unrealized passive capital gains sitting in the economy. that’s in the stock market, in the real estate market that has been booming for at least a decade now. And if that money can be funneled to distressed communities around the US, there’s a pretty powerful tax incentive attached to it and we think it will move markets, it’ll change the way the market works.

Misha Zelinsky:                  That’s really interesting. So yeah, obviously taxes. It controls the flow of money. You’ve talked a lot about the role of capital in these distressed communities. I know the EIG talks a lot about the geographic role of inequality. I’m just wondering about the role. How do you see the role of responsible business in addressing inequality? And obviously we want to see capital investment in distressed communities creating jobs, but what do you think, what’s the role of the business community in addressing wage inequality and lifting up people and making sure that we don’t have a situation where you have people working one job or multiple jobs, and being unable to sustain themselves?

Steve Glickman:                 There’s no doubt that how stagnant wages have been an America is a big source of inequality on a number of different levels. And this was one of the stories of the recession and the recovery was that we gained back all of our high wage jobs. We gained back way more than we lost in terms of low wage jobs, and we didn’t gain back those middle wage jobs. And a big reason for that is the industries that really never came back were a lot of those middle wage industries like manufacturing. Now a lot of thinkers and policymakers in both parties understand that. But then your solution set gets all over the place and a lot of it has been focused for years on well, if we want to bring back those type of jobs, we have to bring back those sectors, and that’s not our perspective.

Steve Glickman:                 It’s manufacturing has fundamentally changed. But those communities that were manufacturing communities need similar quality jobs to replace it. And jobs that fundamentally don’t require a college education. On the democratic side, you hear a lot of talk about how everyone should go to college and that’s just not really a practical solution at least in the US. So you’ve really got to create new business activity in order to change that. And listen, I don’t think you’re going to be able to get there by forcing the corporations to do that, at least not in traditional ways. There is a big competitiveness problem in the US economy. It is much harder for new businesses to start and grow. We’re on this huge 40 year decline in our ability to create. So there’s this myth that the US is this entrepreneurial economy, and of course in some ways we’re more entrepreneurial than many other places around the country. But that edge that the US has is rapidly declining, and in part that’s because we’re creating businesses in such a smaller number of places around the US.

Steve Glickman:                 So again, we think it’s a homegrown problem, and that there are entrepreneurs everywhere. And the way to get at solving that problem is by getting more and more of those entrepreneurs capital. Let me give you one quick stat. If you look at the venture capital industry which is the source of much of the high growth entrepreneurship in the US, nearly 80 percent of that capital is invested in only three states. So three out of the 50 states, Massachusetts, New York, and California get nearly 80 percent of the capital. And that’s true across many other parts of our capital markets. Including how banks lend and where banks are located around the US. So this is a big problem to unravel and we think it starts with how capital flows.

Misha Zelinsky:                  That’s really interesting, and I think it gives us an opportunity to talk a little bit about this geographic inequality, these distressed communities. It’s been discussed a lot and I’m curious to hear your take on it as someone who’s a Democrat and perhaps has a slightly a nuanced view of the election. The geographic role that inequality pied in the US selection, you of course grew up in Michigan. That’s a state that’s blue state gone red, so to speak. But I think that what’s interesting is you talked about there was the loss of jobs, Trump zeroed in on very acutely around this loss of jobs and the promise to bring back steel jobs mining jobs in those distressed communities. And whether it was true or not, it certainly resonated. So I’m curious just a little bit about the geographic role that inequality played in the US election.

Steve Glickman:                 So I think there’s a couple answers to that. One is let’s take a look at how people evaluate the economy. So in a time when the national economy was booming, our unemployment rate was close to four percent and the stock market had been growing for this long bull market. That national level economy was just not resonating to people because frankly, it’s just not how people evaluate the economy. They evaluate the comedy based on what they see happening in their community. And people are really good at evaluating how well their local economies are doing. And as it turns out, a lot of national policy makers and the media don’t fully understand what the country looks like outside of big markets like New York, LA, San Francisco, and DC because that’s where they spend most of their time.

Steve Glickman:                 It looks much different than the rest of America. We for instance looked at swing districts, at places that voted for Barack Obama twice and then voted for Donald trump. And those are places it’d be hard to say that the difference in the election was based on race because they elected for an African American president twice. And much more likely, the driving force there was the economy. And if you look at those counties, and there were 200 plus of them that voted for Barack Obama twice and then voted for Donald trump. The big tying factor for all of them is that three quarters of them lost businesses during the recovery years and lost jobs on net during the recovery years. So while our national unemployment rate is going lower, in those places unemployment rate is not being affected at all. In fact, they’re losing jobs.

Steve Glickman:                 And one of the stories about the economy that people don’t fully understand even now is when we talk about the recovery, we’re talking about a recovery that really disproportionately benefited the top 10 or 20 percent of the country, that the rest of country kind of stayed even. And that the bottom 20 percent of American communities lost jobs and even a greater trajectory than they did before the recession. And in a lot of those places, it was totally rational to say the status quo establishment economic thinking from both parties isn’t working for us. It’s not changing our trajectory. So we’re going to vote for something different. And, one of the things they’re voting for is how to maintain their quality of life, maintain a community where their kids can stay and achieve the American dream.

Steve Glickman:                 And we know the reality is changing in those communities. The tragic thing is I don’t think either party is really giving folks a viable solution for how they change their trajectory. Because a lot of these jobs aren’t coming back. And a lot of the problems for their current economic situation isn’t as simple as trade, or immigration, or any number of issues that have become the threshold issues in our debate. It’s really a much more complicated, long term structural change of communities that haven’t kept up with the how fast the economy’s been changing and having diversified the industries and the opportunities they’ve given to people who have lived in a lot of these cities.

Misha Zelinsky:                  That’s the challenge, isn’t it for progressives I think is that the difficulties of the problem cannot be explained in neat, make America great again, type sloganeering. So that is always the challenge. But what’s interesting as well as you talked a lot about there about the main economies LA, New York, San Francisco. But what’s interesting as well is this so called red state blue state thing where people look at them on a headline map. But what’s actually interesting, if you dig into a blue state, you’ll see that it’s actually perhaps a blue dot or a blue island on a red ocean. And maybe just talk a little bit about the differences between outcomes and metropolitan people versus outcomes in those sorts of non metro rural areas. And the tensions that are building there.

Steve Glickman:                 And I think the problem is even a little more complicated than that. So listen, the geographies that do really well in our economy typically are the suburbs. And the suburbs can be republican or democrat. Some studies going to do really well and some cities tend not to do well. And a lot of those cities, you have large population groups, particularly minority population groups that are doing much worse than whites even in rural areas. But ultimately, I think this comes down to a trajectory. If you’re living in an African American or Hispanic community, even one that’s on absolute terms not doing as well as a lot of white communities, you’re probably doing better than your parents or your grandparents did. And that’s not just an economic issue. That’s also a social justice, civil rights status that have improved for many, many millions of Americans despite a whole set of current challenges.

Steve Glickman:                 If you’re in the white working class community and a lot of those are small town and rural America, your trajectory has gone the opposite direction. You’ve lost. Particularly if you’re in a manufacturing community, you’ve lost those industries. You’ve lost those quality of jobs. You’ve lost your main street. It’s been replaced by a minimum wage jobs. Whether it’s working for really big companies or for distributors or call centers, or whatever is left. And the quality is just different. There are rural communities and small towns in America that are doing great, but disproportionately the parts of the country that are doing the best are cities that are connected to global markets, connected to immigrant communities, and connected to the digital economy. And those are places like you mentioned, like New York and DC and San Francisco and LA, and also other towns that are, cities that are taking advantage of it. In the middle of the country, like Denver and Austin. And Minneapolis and other communities.

Steve Glickman:                 But those are the exceptions. And so the reality is this is not a rural versus urban issue. There’s just huge amounts of distress in both communities, and it’s not even a black versus white issue. But a lot of this has to do with trajectory. And, if you see yourself going the wrong direction, if you see your kids have less opportunities than you do, it makes people angry. And rightfully so. And I think at a starting point, and this goes back to our conversation around Trump, people want to be seen. They want to know that you understand their problem, and how their problem is unique and different because of where they live. And I think to Trump’s credit, he understood it and was able to articulate it. And whether or not you have a good solution for it or not, more politicians on both sides have to articulate that as the biggest problem we need to solve with this country.

Misha Zelinsky:                  I think that’s interesting. And you’ve talked a bit about Trump, but I think what’s interesting and puzzling to a lot of Australians is that you had people that voted for Obama. We had eight years of Obama, and then suddenly those very same people turned around and voted for Trump someone that not only was the antithesis of Obama, but was the leader of the birther movement. So it is quite puzzling from an Australian point of view. But I’d be curious to get your views as someone who worked in the Obama administration in an economic portfolio. Could the Obama administration done more for people, in terms of making sure that those communities weren’t so left behind in the recovery? Because I think Obama rightly put a lot of focus on saving Detroit with the auto bailout and focused very heavily on making sure that those working class jobs were not lost. But should the Obama administration done more and should the Democratic Party have detected this problem that was out there?

Steve Glickman:                 So the short answer is yes. I mean clearly, the Obama administration should have done more. I would separate a little bit the first term from the second term and not just because I served in the first term and not the second.

Steve Glickman:                 But I really think in the first term, the big focus was on the economic infrastructure of both America and the world. Which as you probably remember was teetering. And even right coming out of the recession, people were extremely nervous. Not just about the US, but Europe was going to collapse. That Italy and Spain and Greece, were going to default. And that meant the end of the EU and a new global recession and we would have all been screwed. And so that sucked up a lot of the bandwidth in the first term all the way through. And the bailout and TARP and the stimulus package, and the auto rescue in Detroit. And I’m pretty proud of the role I think the president played in, not just in America but globally in stabilizing the economy.

Steve Glickman:                 In the second term, I think we could’ve done a lot more. In part, we didn’t have as much political capital as we had in the first term for sure. And we didn’t have congress anymore. And that makes it difficult to do real big meaningful things including things that require for instance, changes to the tax code, which you need an act of Congress. Congress controls really all the spending in the US political structure and they were openly at war with the president and vice versa. So, the White House was really limited to what it could do through executive order, which is a much smaller set of authorities then you can do through law. So I think a lot of bridges had been burned by then, and all that political capital had really been used on creating health reform and creating universal access to healthcare, which I think is part of the problem you’re talking about.

Steve Glickman:                 But this is a problem that we could have focused more in on in the second, could have done more about. It’s also a really longterm problem. So the recession was not a turning point for most of these communities except in degree of distress. Most of these places where it had been distressed for at least 10 years before the recession and probably decades beforehand. Detroit hit its peak in the 1950s where it was one of the wealthiest economies in the country and had been in a downward slide as the US lost manufacturing shares to other world economies. And that’s just the way the economy works. So I do think the White House has some blame and the administration has some blame. But at the end of the day, this is as much an issue about local leadership as it is about federal leadership. And there are certain places now that are just well much better prepared to take advantage of this economy than others.

Steve Glickman:                 And once they got lazy and passive, and decided they were gonna hope and pray for another company or another manufacturing plant to take the place of the last one they lost instead of how do we take advantage of this new tech enabled economy and use our infrastructure of universities, I mean don’t forget, places like Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania have had world famous engineering research universities. University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, Ohio State, and so you have the raw firepower to take advantage of the new economy. But it requires a local leadership and local vision to get there. And I think too few places had that until the last couple years or so.

Misha Zelinsky:                  That’s really interesting. And I think you’ve touched a little bit on trade and touched a little bit on the effects of job replacement in communities where you’ve seen perhaps a steelworks shut and not be replaced with anything. One of the things I’m very fond of, and we certainly see similar things in Australia. I certainly see that in my role in the Australian Worker’s Union. One of the things I always say is that trade is good, but fundamentally trade destroys and distributes unevenly. And I think we’ve certainly seen it in the US, but I’m curious at Trump has been putting forward a very muscular focus on trade. He sees trade in a binary sense where a trade balance if it’s negative, the US is losing. And if it’s positive, the US is winning, he sees it in a zero sum manner. Just curious how do progressives grapple with this question of trade which can hurt people, and how do you make sure communities aren’t left behind in the process?

Steve Glickman:                 So there’s no doubt that trade, as a lot of people will say, the benefits of trade are dispersed pretty widely and the impact of trade and the challenges with trade tend to be very concentrated. And that’s certainly the case in the US economy. The economies that were most dominant by manufacturing, not necessarily most dominated by trade because the trade rich, trade dependent economies, some of them are booming. And a lot of the places we mentioned like Seattle and Los Angeles and New York, which are big hubs of trade are doing really well. But if you’re a dominant sector and is manufacturing and you don’t have a diversified economy, than the impact of trade can be huge. And one, as the Democratic Party or either party. I think we need to start by doing a better job giving communities the tools that they need to adapt.

Steve Glickman:                 Some of that is capital and how they access capital so they can build new industries. Some of it is how they retrain workers. We have a terrible and a terribly outdated worker retraining system in the US. It requires you to lose your job. It retrains you into sectors that aren’t producing jobs. It’s both inefficient and ineffective for people. And this is really a place where the private sector can and should play a huge role. If you’re not creating a workforce training system where the private sector is at the table to talk about where their hiring needs are and how government can offload some of that training with the guarantee or the commitment that private sector interview and hire people coming out of these programs, until that works better it’s really hard to solve this problem. But this conversation has been one that progressives have been good or even better at talking about for a long time.

Steve Glickman:                 So if you look at the height of progressivism, you’re really talking about the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, even going into the seventies. So from like FDR through Lyndon Johnson where we had massive policies around retraining, around settling the west. And I think just as importantly and something that the Democratic Party is starting to talk about more around competition and corporate consolidation. So we really have the most consolidated and economy in the US we’ve had since the depression, since the 1920s and thirties where a smaller number of big companies control a bigger part of our economy. And that leads to a lot of this inequality and wage suppression and lack of investment, which we’re all seeing. Because workers and communities are less able to compete. And if you look at where airline hubs have gone from when you’ve gone from having 10 airlines to having four airlines. Or where banks are located. Bank of America shut down 10,000 of their branches over the last 10 years. And community banks are growing at a slower rate than ever, which means small business lending in this country is basically plateaued at a 20 year low.

Steve Glickman:                 So it matters what the private sector is made up of, not just what they do. And if they’re made up of lots more of, many more companies that are growing and more dispersed as opposed to a few really big companies, it makes a big difference in the economy. And so this question around how you create a more competitive economy in the US is really important. And Democrats used to talk about this all the time, and we really stopped talking about it in the last 20 or 30 years.

Misha Zelinsky:                  It’s interesting. It’s interesting, the concept of competition. It’s a bit of an anathema sometimes to those on the progressive side of politics, but competition is inherently good for the economy. It’s also good for consumers, which fundamentally the people that we seek to stand up for which are families, people buying things. And you want to see competition in wages, making sure that wages are going up and competing for labor, but also that you want to see competition in the cost of goods and reducing the cost of living for people. So it is interesting the level of concentration, but also what you’re seeing increasingly is a global phenomenon. We certainly see it here in Australia with many US firms where it’s winner takes all markets. And, one of the things I’m curious actually if your take on this and I think perhaps I could already know your answer. But one of the solutions being advocated is universal basic income. If there’s no jobs and jobs that are being inherently more and more consolidated into mega firms and you’re seeing market’s up ended and people unable to work, that we should have a universal basic income, which is basic principle.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Everyone gets, no matter if you’re a billionaire or dirt poor, everyone gets a certain income and then off you go to try to do best from there. But I think that there are certainly some problems with that idea, but I’m curious about your take on that because I think fundamentally, the better outcome is you want to see a good job. If you lose a good job in a steelworks, a unionized job, it’s well paid that it’s replaced with another good job and it’s not that you’re on your own driving Uber and trying to make ends meet.

Steve Glickman:                 So I dislike almost everything about UBI. One I think it’s an American. We already really have a UBI through our social security system, and it’s just for people who can’t contribute to the economy. People who are disabled or a retired, or for reasons that are no fault of their own no longer working. And then it makes sense to have a massive safety net, one that’s growing with the way the economy’s changing, for people who are no longer contributing. But otherwise our system is premised on people working. And I believe people want to work and want quality jobs where they’re contributing to their economy and being, their wages reflect their contribution.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Well there’s a dignity in work as well, right?

Steve Glickman:                 Of course. But in UBI is like giving up. It’s a form of charity and saying we can’t solve this problem of how we create new businesses and new industries and train people with new skills. So we’re going to pay people, but we’re going to pay them a poverty level wage. And I believe even if we could afford it, which we couldn’t because you gotta think in the US, if you’re paying for 350 million people, but let’s assume half of those are workers, so 150 million workers and you’re paying them $15,000 a year, you’re talking about a program in the trillions of dollars a year. And the US doesn’t have that type of capital. It can’t afford that program. And even if it could afford that program, it would suck away from every other single domestic spending program we had. We’ have a UBI program, and a Pentagon, and social security and Medicare. And that’s all the economy could withstand. The US budget $4 billion dollars a year. You’re talking about this would be something like 40 or 50 percent of our budget.

Steve Glickman:                 So I don’t think it’s either politically or economically viable, which is why I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. But I think conceptually it’s also a broken. And we shouldn’t be giving up. On the Republican Party, I think as they see the economy particularly in the lens of this new republicanism, it’s very focused on how we separate ourselves from immigrants and our trading partners. And I think that’s a big mistake, and it’s particularly a big mistake in the context of immigration.

Steve Glickman:                 Immigrants, there are very few economic thinkers who would tell you that immigration is not a large net positive to any economy. These are people that want to be here, that want at work, that are disproportionately business owners and the creator of high growth businesses. Something like half of our venture backed businesses in the US, 50 percent are backed by immigrants or immigrant co-founders. So they’re a huge part of our economy. But on the democratic side, there’s this theory around the future of work that robots and artificial intelligence are taking over and there’s nothing we can do about it. So let’s just pay everyone, five or 10 or $15,000 a year. And to me that’s just as big of a cop out.

Misha Zelinsky:                  It’s technological determinism, so that we have no control over the technology that we can’t shape it to our way either, right?

Steve Glickman:                 Well first, yes. And there is no evidence of that. Our economic evidence shows a low productive, low wage, low unemployment economy. And if there were tons of robots and artificial intelligence, productivity will be super high. Wages would be higher and there’d be a lot less jobs because robots would be doing it. So that’s not the case right. Now that even if you thought that was the case 10 or 20 or 30 years from now, which I don’t subscribe to, the fatalistic way to your point that we look at this is sad. Because there are lots of things we should try. If we thought robots were going to take over the economy in 30 years, then the solution is let’s not give everyone charity so they’re making a poverty wage. The solution is how do we prepare more American communities and more American workers to take advantage of that technology enabled economy? We need more thinking about that, not more thinking about how we’re going to spend more money to spend our way out of this problem. At least in my view.

Misha Zelinsky:                  I subscribe to that view too. I don’t think the UBI, whilst it’s interesting, I think it’s under the assumption that there’s no work, and I don’t believe there will be no work. So I think it’s actually making sure that the work we have is well paid and people are skilled for it accordingly. But so I’m just curious. You touched on immigration there and the role that immigrants play. And I think any policy person would agree with you, but that’s certainly not the mood in the community globally. You’re seeing it in Europe, you’re seeing it in Australia, you’re seeing it in the United States, suddenly with Trump with his wall. How can progressives articulate a positive view of immigration and not purely on an identity basis, but on an economic basis?

Steve Glickman:                 Well listen. Fear and economic scarcity or the perception of economic scarcity drive bad policy decisions, and they drive anti-immigrant thinking for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Misha Zelinsky:                  This is not new. That’s important.

Steve Glickman:                 No. And I think for a lot of these issues, the question like for instance, the answer to trade is not making a better argument for trade. And the answer for immigration is not making a better argument for immigration. It’s ultimately solving that perception people have of economic scarcity and that they’re in decline. And so these are all first order questions. It starts with if you want to get those issues right, and we may get them wrong for the next four or five or six or seven or eight years. And it’s not because people are in my view, hateful or mean or irrational. It’s because they don’t see any other option. So I think we have to give people other options. We have to convince them that there’s a way they’re going to get skills and there’s gonna be new programs, new cooperation between the public and private sector around how we upscale people.

Steve Glickman:                 I think they have to see that investors are rebuilding a bigger part of this country because they buy the fact that there’s a future in more places than just a handful of cities around the country, and they have to see new businesses start in their backyard so the trend lines aren’t just Kmart and Target, and then came Walmart, and then came Amazon, and out went all the local businesses that thrive and grow in these economies.

Steve Glickman:                 And by the way, the notion that San Francisco and LA, and New York, and DC are better places because everyone’s crammed into them looking for opportunity and they have to pay outrageous amounts to buy condos. It costs over a million dollars to buy a one bedroom condo in San Francisco now, and they’re losing more people than they’re taking in because nobody wants to live there anymore, because it’s unlivable. The fact that that’s a better outcome even for those economies is crazy.

Steve Glickman:                 So this requires dramatic action. The market’s not going to work it out. People are not mobile. We have lower rates of mobility in the US than we’ve ever had before because people don’t have the connections, the skills, the capital they need to be able to move to places that have these industries. The only solution is to create more industries and more businesses in a bigger chunk of the country. And I think there’s plenty of interesting entrepreneurs and you, I think at this point earlier. We know there’s plenty of work because there’s plenty of problems to solve. Work is just a function of solving problems for other people. Whether it’s the problem of how you create stuff in mass or how you grow stuff in mass, or how you provide certain services to people. And most of those jobs you can trade away.

Steve Glickman:                 Our economy like the Australian economy is mostly a services economy. And those services are locally provided. They’re your restaurants and dry cleaners, and they’re your bars and your doctors, much of this stuff you get locally. So a lot of the economy is not going to change dramatically. We’re really talking about the parts of the economy that are globally connected, and if you just focus in on that part of the problem, there are solutions there. At least in the US, we have a huge infrastructure around our capital markets and our labor markets and it’s just working really efficiently, and we as a society and the government can fix that if we wanted to.

Misha Zelinsky:                  That’s a really interesting point. So earlier on, you touched on this concept of unamerican. I think as an Australian, I certainly understand what you mean by that and I think many people in the world would. What’s a lot of people asking at the moment is what is it that America stands for? And I know that’s a broad question, but we talked a little bit about immigration and Trump’s take on that. And, we talked a little bit about trade. The US, for many, many decades now since certainly since World War II is been the guarantor and the prorector and advocate of an open global system. Be it of immigration, be it of trade and has also added support that with its institutions. Now in recent times, the US is turning in on itself. So I’m curious about how does the US with these challenges that it has around inequality, around the negatives around trade and around the negatives around immigration and the political impacts of that is happening, and the political part is detecting that? But at the same time, the rest of the world, countries like Australia, other western liberal democracies are looking to the us to say how is it that the US can help underpin the challenges we’re seeing from China, from Russia, from other models. From non-US models. And how can the US juggle both its challenges at home but also help us friends abroad?

Steve Glickman:                 Well, listen. There’s no doubt we’re at an unprecedented point in our politics where leadership that our friends around the world who are used to seeing from the US is lacking, at least in terms of our role in the global economic stage. With that being said, nothing in my view so far has fundamentally changed. We’re still a part of an active participant in the WTO, the World Trade Organization. We still have, with some very small exceptions given the size of our economy, a very open market both for investment and portrayed. We still have a immigrant rich country, that takes in large numbers of people every year and it brings a large number of tourists here, and large number of people are educated around the world in US universities. So I think the tone and the rhetoric is certainly off in terms of where the US is traditionally lead.

Steve Glickman:                 I’m not sure anything has fundamentally changed yet in terms of how the American economy and the American immigration system fundamentally works. Now of course, some of it is starting to change. I think it’s an open question of whether Congress pushes back against that. Our system is, the president’s got a lot of authority, particularly around foreign policy issues, but very little unilateral authority around core economic issues. And that includes trade, taxes, and even immigration where the president’s powers are limited. So congress ultimately has to come along, and I think what you’re not seeing is an acceptance from either party, including the Republican Party that their norms have fundamentally changed around trade or even that our national consensus has changed around immigration yet. I wish we were letting in far more immigrants than we are now, and I wish we had not pulled out of the transpacific partnership, which I think would have put us on a much stronger footing to be closer allied to Australia and Japan, and Korea, and other countries in the region in dealing with China. That was a big I think self inflicted wound.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Let’s talk about TPP. Let’s just talk about TPP.

Steve Glickman:                 But I’m not sure how much has fundamentally changed in the US beyond that.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Yeah, because I think TPP is interesting because you talked about trade. And you said the US president has limited powers. But the TPP, I think there are a lot of problems with that deal. But nevertheless, the TPP was seen as the US as part of Obama’s pivot into Asia is about setting the rules of the game, setting the rules of the road. And the US 2016 election pulled, both parties away. I mean the Republicans got pulled away first through trump’s challenge internally, but then Hillary Clinton was also pulled to the left by a firstly Bernie sanders and then Trump himself who she was effectively crucified over NAFTA and the impact that NAFTA had rightly or wrongly at least in a perception sense on the communities we talked about earlier. So that’s I think one real world example, and China are filling I suppose the vacuum around TPP with their one belt, one road initiative, certainly in the Asian region. So I think there’s certainly already observable impacts from new us retreat from an open liberal system.

Steve Glickman:                 Yes. I mean you’re totally right. I wouldn’t buy too heavily into any of the campaign rhetoric, at least from Hillary Clinton’s camp around TPP. She was one of the architects of TPP when she was the secretary of state in the Obama administration. And if you look back at the history of trade agreements, it’s typically been democratic presidents who have done the heavy lifting on trade despite the stereotypes of the party. Bill Clinton got NAFTA done. I’m, Barack Obama did most of the heavy lifting around the TPP. Kennedy was really the initiator of the first big trade expansion in US history, and Roosevelt and Truman were big supporters of how you use economic diplomacy to solve big means here. I think what we got wrong in the TPP debate was that it’s fundamentally an economic agreement. It’s fundamentally a political agreement. I think the biggest, most important part about TPP was securing our place and our alliance within Asia and dealing with any number of issues that balanced powers in East Asia that would give us better footing from everything from North Korea to the South China Sea, to engaging with Russia and elsewhere.

Steve Glickman:                 And that should’ve been the debate we were really having because that’s where it has the biggest impact. It would have honestly marginal economic impact even though these are really big markets because we had agreements with most of these countries. The only one that we didn’t have a meaningful agreement with was Japan. And that’s where a lot of the tussling was at the end and it was around really small issues. Most of the tussling and these agreements, for instance, TPP happening around Ag. And the AG sector in the US is .5 percent of our GDP. 99.5 percent is something else. Manufacturing, services, natural resources. This is a really small part of the US economy and that’s not really what the agreement was about. It was about a new political order or at least preserving a political balance in Asia. And unfortunately we’re losing some of that.

Steve Glickman:                 What’s interesting is that the president’s in Singapore right now trying to create a new political packed with the Koreas, and we’ll see if that works and we’ll see whether his shoot from the hip model is effective. I’m not ruling it out. It’s not the only way to get there. But I do think when we take away the tools from our tool box, which trade is a big one of those tools, we hurt our standing around the world and thus hurt US security and foreign policy interests.

Misha Zelinsky:                  So you talked about China and the South China Sea. One of the things that Australia focuses a lot on is the role of China and trying to grapple with the economic underpinning relationship that we have with the Chinese, and also the challenge that China brings to the liberal world order, but also the challenges that it brings to our launches with the United States and other like minded countries, and they’ve been very city in the South China Sea.

Misha Zelinsky:                  So there is a lot of nervousness around the US’s continued role as a strategic guarantor of freedom of navigation in South China Sea. But also, do you see that the US is focused enough on the challenge that China has brought? The US tends to be at its best when it’s challenged. Much like in the Cold War, but also with the rise of Japan. And do you see that it might actually bring the best out of the US in terms of raising its own standards, but also reaching out to friends around the world?

Steve Glickman:                 Well, China is the most complicated national security foreign policy issue the US has to deal with. And we have a really complex, multifaceted conversation with China that’s ongoing and has been ongoing for years. However, I think 2018 is not the 1940s and 50s. I think that across the world, countries that have long relied on the US as a guarantor have to start taking care of their own backyard. And that’s both Europe and Asia. I think the Europeans have to step up and play a bigger role in world affairs. They’ve got the resources, they have the military technology and the military powers to do it. I think it’s the same thing in Asia. I think that Japan’s, the current construct that Japan is going to be taken care of by the US is one that’s been outdated over the course of 70 years, and that everyone needs to play a role in keeping up their own backyard.

Steve Glickman:                 The US is not the sole world power. It’s undoubtedly still be richest and most powerful country in the world, but that margin has decreased across a number of different factors. And that means other countries have to step up. And the US, listen. I have no doubt that over even the medium term, the US will know its allies from its friends and be there for its allies when push comes to shove. But it’s a lot easier if our allies have leverage in their own regions. I think frankly, not to preach to the choir here, but Australia has done a really good job of this. Australia’s emerged as a powerful force in Asia. It’s a tiny country, because it has stepped up, and stepped up in a lot places have where it’s had the US back where it didn’t really need to, in I think asserting its roll and influence. I’d like to see Japan step up in a similar way and I’d like to see Germany step up in a similar way in Europe. These are the two richest country in the world aside from the US and China, and they need to step up.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Yeah, I think that’s an interesting point. And I know the Japanese certainly are looking at amending their constitution. But I do think even from a leveraging resources standpoint, it’s important that every country unifies. Because people often look at it as though it’s a United States versus China, but when you actually look at it, if you add the liberal democracies. You add Europe, you add the US, you add the UK, now Australia and other countries. You put those together, the GDP between those countries is extraordinarily huge. And you can certainly leverage that in a number of strategic ways, further the projection of a broader liberal order.

Misha Zelinsky:                  But I just want to take it back to domestic politics. You are, as I said earlier, a senior figure in the Democratic Party. And you’re also based in Chicago, which is endlessly fascinating. From a political standpoint, it’s obviously the political home of Barack Obama. I’m curious, you didn’t grow up there, but you’re now in there. So maybe you could give us some insights as to how you ended up in Chicago from a political standpoint, and we’ll talk a little bit about the midterms as well.

Steve Glickman:                 So two small corrections. One, very few people would describe me as a senior figure in the Democratic Party.

Misha Zelinsky:                  I’m being generous mate.

Steve Glickman:                 And two, I don’t live in Chicago. I live in Washington DC.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Oh yes you do. But you are Chicago Bears, Cubs fan?

Steve Glickman:                 I do. My dad and my grand father grew up in Chicago, so spent a lot of time there growing up and a big Chicago cubs fans.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Someone needs to do better research for me.

Steve Glickman:                 No, I chalk it up to the time zone change. That’s probably what’s contributing to this.

Misha Zelinsky:                  That’s right. So your family is from Chicago. That’s right, isn’t it? And that is a very democratic political city.

Steve Glickman:                 Yeah, although every city is a Democratic city these days for the most part. But yeah, there are these very storied democratic roots in the, in the city of Chicago.

Steve Glickman:                 Listen, I think that there’s this, what’s I think interesting to me now is there’s been this incredible comeback story of the role of cities as almost replacements from actors on the federal level. There’s lots of ways you’re seeing this in ways that are kind of surprising, if you look at climate change and the pact Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles has pulled together by getting a large contingency of mayors to subscribe to certain climate change goals. Even with us pulling out of the Paris Accords. Or whether it’s the role cities are playing in creating new economic future for their citizens without relying on the federal government to step up and do anything dramatic. The most interesting I think politics right now are city level politics. And some of these cities, their economies are so large, whether it’s LA, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. That they rival many countries around the world, so they’re starting to pursue their own trade missions, and starting to pursue their own commercial diplomacy around the world.

Steve Glickman:                 And so I think those are really fascinating trends of the rise of cities around the world, and I wonder whether they’ll start to displace the role of federal governments everywhere when there’s more interesting things happening in the city level than on a national level.

Misha Zelinsky:                  And so just coming up to the midterms and a lot of attention on the elections. A lot going on. It will be very important, at least to Trump’s presidency, whether or not the Democrats can secure either of the houses. How do you see that probably playing out?

Steve Glickman:                 So I think as is typical in lots of midterm elections, the opposition party does really well. And I expect Democrats in 2018 certainly in the house. There’s a much more challenging playing field in the Senate in 2018 because Democrats are defending so many seats in the Senate. But I expect us to do very well in the house. I think Democrats will take over leadership of the house, and I think there’s a lot of signals you’re getting from existing members of Congress, including in the Republican Party where you see a number of senior retirements among Republicans in the house. Which is a pretty good signal that they don’t have a strong feeling they’re going to hold onto power next year. Now with that being said, being in control of one house of Congress only gives you so much when the presidency is the other party and the Senate is the other party, which I think is like most likely to be the case. Although the Democrats have a fighting shot to take over the Senate. We’re only down two seats. 49 seats are held by Democrats in the Senate and 51 are held by Republicans.

Steve Glickman:                 But it will make a difference in at least slowing down the agenda that President Trump has in the White House because he’ll be forced to work with Democrats. I think it might be a very interesting paradigm though, because I think President Trump has shown that he’s willing to work with Democrats and Republicans when the circumstances are right. And so I wonder if he’s going to have some issues he can work on with a democratic house.

Steve Glickman:                 I think the other big looming question is whether a democratic house moves forward to impeach the president, which they can do with-

Misha Zelinsky:                  I’m curious to ask you about that because you’re a former trial attorney at the Department of Justice, so it’d be remiss of me not to ask you on the Trump Russia investigation, how you see that playing out.

Steve Glickman:                 Yeah. And there’s also an investigator for congress. I investigated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so a sense for how that process works. So all democrats would need is a majority vote in the house to impeach the president. And they should I think have the numbers to do that if everyone voted that way, I’m not sure everyone would. I think right now, I think the grounds on which to impeach the president are pretty late. I think that there would be some unintended consequences of this creating some sympathy for the White House and a distraction for an agenda the Democrats may want to start to lay out going into the 2020 presidential election. And I don’t think it’s likely to result in the president being removed from office because Democrats would need two thirds of the Senate, which is likely to be controlled by Republican to be pretty close to 50/50.

Steve Glickman:                 And so they would need a number of Republican votes. Unless there’s a smoking gun that comes out of the Bob Mueller investigation of the Trump campaign, and their connections with Russia which at least I’ve not seen or heard yet. I don’t think that’s very likely to be successful. And I’m not even sure whether that vote will be taken in the house because it comes with a lot of political risk. So I think the president is likely to serve out his term and I think there’s likely to be a Democrat who’s speaker of the house. And that brings us to 2020, which I image you’re curious about as well.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Yeah you’re well ahead of me mate. You’re just naturally guiding yourself to the questions. But so 2020, you’ve talked a lot about I think a bit of a different democratic agenda for certainly in respect to the campaign that the Democrats ran in 2016. So I’d be curious to see what you think are some of the lead candidates are to take on Trump in 2020 in the assumption that he’s there, and then who you might favor?

Steve Glickman:                 So I’ll answer both those questions maybe a little differently than how you asked them. One, let me just talk about the context now. So if you ask voters, and I’ve heard this pretty recently from very experienced public opinion researchers who have looked at how voters view the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and the president. I think you get some surprising results. One, the president’s a lot more popular than people give him credit for. And in part, I think it’s a factor of the fact that the economy is still really strong, and the president’s viewed as very strong on the economy. And he’s viewed as someone who a while his unfavorability rates are still very high and they had been all the way through the campaign, even when he won. People view him as pretty strong, as someone willing to stand up to what he thinks is right. And someone who’s good at business and good at the economy.

Steve Glickman:                 And that still holds true. And if you ask voters what Republicans stand for, it’s pretty clear to them they stand for less government spending, lower taxes, and for big business. Now as a Democrat, I think that’s a very vulnerable set of associations to have with voters, because people like a lot of the things government provide. And they’re I think skeptical of large businesses, but you have to give them an alternative vision. And when you ask voters what they think about Democrats and their economic vision, there’s a series of like 10 question marks in that answer. No one has any idea.

Steve Glickman:                 I was close with Hillary Clinton’s economic team when she was running her campaign for president. And I could not tell you what her priorities were, and I can easily tell you what Trump’s priorities were. In fact, he stayed pretty focused on them. I may disagree with a number of them, but you know what they are. And so Democrats first and foremost, they need a positive vision for the economy, which is the only game in town. People don’t vote in foreign policy issues, and they don’t vote on social issues, at least on a federal level. They really vote on the academy, first and foremost. It’s issues like one through five for when you ask people what’s most important to them, it relates to the economy. It’s healthcare, it’s housing, it’s a good job. It’s my community, etc. Wages. So we need to give them a reason to vote for democrats. We really need a new economic world view and vision and philosophy. And ultimately that boils down to a new generational thinking of this.

Steve Glickman:                 There’s this very outdated notion in I think both democratic and republican circles that we’re still having a debate that’s left versus right or left versus center. When really we’re having the most important debate is one that’s new versus old. It’s a new generation where you’d see a lot of agreement around certain issues among new republicans in new democrats. A new generation of them, let’s say under 45. And the old views of what the parties stands for, and that I think is the most important debate in the country. Now, democrats are going to run 20 candidates for president. And lots of them are impressive and maybe might be very good presidents. I’d give you some who I think are going to be front runners.

Steve Glickman:                 I think you’ll see Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey do well. I think you’ll see Terry McAuliffe, the former governor from Virginia do really well. I think you’ll see Jason Kander, a young rising star from Missouri who ran for senate and has now become a national figure. I think you’ll see him do very well. But I think all of them are going to have a really tough time beating the president. It’s very hard to beat incumbent presidents. It’s very hard to beat incumbent presidents in a really good economy. It’s really hard to be incumbent presidents in a good economy who’s maintained a pretty high level of popularity in his own party. And he’s extremely popular in republican circles. The notion that he’s vulnerable is a total farce. His approval rating in the republican party is 80 percent or higher. This is like George W. Bush numbers after 9/11. He doesn’t have to win by much to win. So I think you need a democrat that’s got a real affirmative vision that people want. It’s got to be more than being anti-Trump. And frankly, I have not heard much of that breakthrough in the party so far and it makes me very nervous the democrats are not prepared Well for 2020.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Well that’s a very sobering analysis and we’ll leave it on that note on the serious. All our guests are asked, so I know you’ve been to Australia and this is about making, the show’s called Diplomates. So it’s about making some mateship across the ocean. So just curious about having visited Australia, who are the three Australians that you would invite to a barbecue, and obviously you’d invite me. So I’d be there anyway. So I’d be looking for you to think of three others mate.

Steve Glickman:                 Yeah. Well I need someone to drink all the beer. So that’d be you. So I’m going to stick in the political and economics lens around three Australians I’d like to have dinner with. So let’s start with politics. We’re bipartisan, so I’ll take a bipartisan approach to this. So on the left, definitely Julian Assange, I’d want to have him at the table. When I think about Australia-

Misha Zelinsky:                  You might have to get him in by Skype mate. I don’t know whether or not he’s going to be allowed out of the embassy, but …

Steve Glickman:                 You didn’t say it had to be practical. You just said who I want. If I’m thinking about someone who to me represents Australia, it’s Julian Assange on the left. On the right, the most famous Australian, most consequential Australia I can think of is Rupert Murdoch. So he’d be the Australia and I’d have from the right. I’m sure you’re loving these choices. You’ll like choice number three.

Steve Glickman:                 So choice number three would be an economics focused choice. And the person I have in mind gave probably the most compelling analysis of what happened in the economic crisis of anyone I’ve seen, American or Australia. And do you know who that would be? She’s from a very famous movie you may know.

Misha Zelinsky:                  I ask the questions on this thing mate, so I have absolutely no idea. But you’ve got me on tender hooks right now with Julian Assange and that Rupert Murdoch.

Steve Glickman:                 So number three in this trio would be Margot Robbie, because there’s no one I’d rather listen to on the economy then than Margot Robbie. I think she, Julian, and Rupert all in one room would be a tremendous Instagram photo at least.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Well, Steve Glickman, Margot Robbie, Rupert Murdoch, and Julian Assange would make quite a group. I don’t know whether or not either Rupert or Julian would want me there, but I’d certainly be happy to get along and at least drink couple of those beers you talked about. Steve, thanks so much for your time. I think it’s been a fantastic chat, a lot of great insights and good luck with everything. Hopefully if we don’t see on the ticket in 2020, hopefully see 2024, 2028 Glickman. I’ll be there handing out for you mate.

Steve Glickman:                 Well, I appreciaTe that. That will never happen, but I do appreciate you having me on the show anyhow and love talking with you. Good on your Misha.

Misha Zelinsky:                  Never say never mate. Thanks a lot.

Steve Glickman:                 Talk to you, bye.