Can America Bring Order to Global Anarchy? Charles Kupchan on How to Govern the 21st-Century World

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's always nice to see old friends of the show recognized. One of our oldest of old friends is Jason Pack from the Disorder podcast. He just got longlisted on the British Podcast Awards, much deserved. Jason was on in May talking about the Iran war. He said nobody's winning. All we have is disorder. Jason is an American based in London. And if there is an American in the disorder camp, it's another old friend of the show, Charles Kupchan. He's been on the show many times. Last year, he came on to talk about the abundance of morbid symptoms when it came to the demolition of what he called Pax Americana. And now Charles has a new book out very much in the disorder camp, entitled Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come. He's joining us from, I'm guessing, a rather ordered Washington, DC. Charles, congratulations on the new book. Was there ever a time where the world was ordered? I know that you're rather nostalgic for order. Do you have some examples in history in the book where we had more order than we seem to have today?

00:02:01 Charles Kupchan: Hi, Andrew. Good to be back with you. You know, I would say that disorder is the default position in history, but we have over the course of the last couple of centuries really emerged into a world where periods of order have existed. Probably the first example of international government was the Concert of Europe that emerged in 1815 when Europe's five major powers came together and created a system of congresses and meetings that they used to avoid war, to settle disputes peacefully, to change the status quo only when there was a consensus. And then after the concert collapsed during the second half of the nineteenth century, we entered a very unstable rocky period. We had two world wars in the space of a few decades. And then I think the Cold War was an order of sorts. It was a bipolar order. It depended more on deterrence than on an agreement on rules. So there was stability more than there was order. But I think, Andrew, that the need for order, the need for an agreed-upon set of rules is more important today than it's ever been. And that's because the world is more globalized. It's more interdependent than it has ever been. We are in the same boat, and either we will row together or we will sink together. And that's why I think a conversation about where we go from here trying to build order in the post-Trump era is so important. And in general, Andrew, we have ordering moments in history after great power wars, after the wars of the Reformation, the Peace of Westphalia is—

00:04:06 Andrew Keen: Right. You jumped on my next question. You brought up a Concert of Europe— in 1815, of course, that came out of the Napoleonic Wars, and then you talked about the Cold War that came out of the second and perhaps in a way the First World War. So I'm not suggesting we should have a terrible war, Charles. I mean, I'd be the last person to suggest that. It's not even something we can really joke about. But are these wars that are going on in the world, these wars that we don't seem to be able to stamp out, whether it's in Gaza or Ukraine, are they too small to generate the kind of order that you're looking for?

00:04:48 Charles Kupchan: Well, you know, I— I'm hoping that we can have an ordering moment without war. I don't really think we've seen that kind of episode in history, but we can't wait around for another great power war before we have a serious searching conversation about how to build order and stability in the world to come. And one of the reasons that I wrote the book was to try to jump-start, to trigger that conversation. Are the wars that are going on today the stuff of a world war, of a global conflagration? Probably not, but we don't know. You know, in some ways, I think the war in Ukraine is more dangerous than the war in the Persian Gulf, and that's simply because there is a risk of escalation. Right? The Russians, a nuclear power, are fighting a major war in Ukraine. The United States and NATO don't have boots on the ground, but they're helping Ukraine. They're helping Ukraine target Russians. And in that respect, we're not that far away from a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia. We have Russia taking very provocative actions. Drones are heading into NATO airspace. Hybrid warfare is occurring. Cyberattacks are occurring. It's not a stretch to imagine an escalation to a direct conflict between NATO and Russia.

00:06:20 Andrew Keen: Charles, I take your point. And if we wanna think historically, if the Concert of Europe is the model that we should be trying to reconstruct, to emulate, then is the historical moment that we're trying to avoid, the years leading up to 1914. Last time you came on the show, you talked about the abundance of morbid symptoms. That term, of course, is borrowed from Antonio Gramsci, who talked about interregnums. When it comes to the global system, are we in a kind of interregnum? Is it one where the abundance of morbid symptoms reflect the fact that we know the old world has disappeared, but we're not quite sure what's going to replace it?

00:07:09 Charles Kupchan: Spot on, Andrew. You know, I think that the quote from Gramsci really does capture our moment. The old is dying and the new cannot be born. And in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. We're in an interregnum that is the product of two tectonic shifts. One is a redistribution of global power on a scale that we haven't seen in several centuries. Power is shifting from west to east and from north to south. We're going from a unipolar world dominated by the United States to a multipolar world where nobody will call the shots. And we're already seeing geopolitical competition kick in as the diffusion of power moves forward. And the other tectonic shift is that the advance of the digital age has effectively destroyed the social contract of the industrial era. Many Brits, Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, Americans, South Koreans, our politics are very screwed up, to use a technical term today, largely because many of our workers are having a hard time making ends meet. And that's largely because of automation more than it is free trade. And so this socioeconomic disruption caused by digital technology is combining with this top-down disruption caused by the diffusion of power to put us into a historical inflection point.

00:08:43 Andrew Keen: So what about the role of America in all this, Charles? You're a fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations [as spoken: Council on Foreign Relations], one of the leading institutes of its type in the world. You're also a professor of political science at Georgetown, so you're in the heart of power. Is America suited for this moment? We did a show recently with the British historian Anthony Badger, who has a really interesting new book out. It's called Prosperity Road: America, 1920–1945, from Hoover to Roosevelt. And we talked about the way in which America went from having a standing army just after the First World War, the standing army the size of Sweden or Portugal to being the sole or certainly one of the only superpowers after the Second World War. Is America suited to this moment?

00:09:34 Charles Kupchan: Well, the United States remains the world's leading power measured either in economic terms or in military terms, and it's going to stay at the top for quite a long time. China is catching up economically, but it is not catching up militarily, and it will take decades for the United States to have a peer competitor in China when it comes to the military. But I don't think that the United States is well suited to the moment politically, and that's because the country is deeply fractured. Democrats and Republicans tend to live on different planets when it comes both to domestic policy and foreign policy. Congress is mostly paralyzed, and Republicans and Democrats in Congress barely speak to each other. And one of the hallmarks of American grand strategy during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century was this vital center, the sweet political spot where Democrats and Republicans came together during the industrial era largely because everybody's boat was floating up. And they got behind a steady brand and a purposeful brand of American statecraft. Right now, the United States doesn't know its own mind. It's all over the map. When power changes hands in Washington, our grand strategy changes quite dramatically. And so I do think that if the US is going to guide the world through this moment of transition, we need to get our heads screwed back on. And that will require figuring out a new social contract for the digital age, rebuilding the middle class, rebuilding the political center. Strength starts at home.

00:11:32 Andrew Keen: It all sounds rather vague, Charles, a new digital contract. You sound like a Democratic strategist without much clue of really what's happening out here in Silicon Valley or the idea of a new social contract for the middle class. These things sound fine maybe on a— in terms of a political speech. There'll be Democratic and probably Republican candidates in the next year or two articulating this kind of hot air. But it doesn't actually mean anything. I mean, how are these things gonna come about?

00:12:07 Charles Kupchan: I think it means everything, Andrew. If you ask where does Trump come from, he comes from the fact that there are many disaffected Americans out there that feel left behind. They don't live in Palo Alto. They don't live in Santa Clara. Most of them don't live in San Francisco because they can't afford to. And the reason they can't afford to is that we have seen a huge and growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. And Trump, in many respects, figured out how to speak to them, how to sense their grievance, and how to pretend because he does pretend that he's their guy. But I do think that we do have to have a national conversation about what working Americans are gonna do in 2035 to earn a living wage. Right? They used to work—

00:13:03 Andrew Keen: Okay. I take your point, and I've heard this many times before. What is a national conversation? I always hear this phrase. What does it mean? You mean they all get on the Internet and start talking at the same time? What does a national conversation actually mean?

00:13:18 Charles Kupchan: It means that members of Congress, when they're in Washington, when they're back home talking to labor unions and to corporate heads, they need to figure out how to create an education and employment ecosystem that trains Americans for the jobs of the future. Because the bottom line, Andrew, is that Democrats and Republicans have not been speaking the truth to the American people. They have been saying, we're gonna use tariffs, and we're gonna use industrial policy, and we're gonna reindustrialize the country, and you're gonna get back your well-paid job on the production line. It will not happen. We're not going back to building refrigerators and air conditioners. And it's gonna get worse before it gets better because your buddies in Silicon Valley are leaping ahead in AI. AI is gonna displace more workers. Those workers are gonna have a hard time finding new jobs unless they are trained for the jobs of the future. That's the kind of conversation that we need to have that we are not having.

00:14:28 Andrew Keen: But to have that national conversation, whatever that means, you're a theorist of international rather than domestic politics. So you use the Concert of Europe in 1815 as a sort of model for rearchitecting the international system and bringing order to anarchy. You gotta have a catastrophe, Charles. I'm not suggesting that that catastrophe is a good thing, but something has to happen pretty serious. I mean, even back in the 1930s to have the converse— what you called this national conversation of the New Deal required a massive economic crash and the catastrophe of the First World War. So what has to happen to have this national conversation?

00:15:14 Charles Kupchan: Well, in some ways, I think the current moment is a wake-up call. And then I see Donald Trump in some ways as the change agent that we need to drive home the point that we are in an interregnum, that the old order wasn't working, and that we need to transition to a new order. I don't think that Donald Trump is going to get us there because he's very good at bringing down the old order, but he hasn't really begun a conversation of what that new order might look like. And so I do think that it behooves those of us who are thinking about these issues to try to start that conversation. Where should we go in the post-Trump era? What might a working order for the twenty-first century look like? And, you know, you're saying what does a national conversation mean? Well, what it means is the conversation that you and I are having right now. That's how things happen. That's how things change. You need to get people thinking about this issue, throwing spaghetti at the wall, and beginning to think creatively about how we're gonna manage this transition and get to the other end without a great power war. That conversation, Andrew, hasn't begun. It needs to begin.

00:16:39 Andrew Keen: You've talked about Trump several times already in this conversation. I don't wanna turn this conversation into another Trump conversation. But, of course, Trump blames the old order for the— in his view, at least, the current weakness in America. He's— he was particularly critical or has been particularly critical of American foreign policy in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, although he, in Iran, seems to have fallen into the same trap. Recently, we had somebody I know you know, Eliot Cohen, on the show. He has a new book out, The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics. Cohen was very much a neocon, in with Rumsfeld and many of the figures around— Wolfowitz and the second Bush administration, Condi Rice. The Trump line, of course, is that the problems in America have been caused by the old order, by guys like Eliot Cohen and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and all the rest of these characters. Is there any truth to that, Charles, when it comes to foreign policy?

00:17:48 Charles Kupchan: Yes. I mean, I don't wanna, you know, assign blame to particular individuals because I think the Democrats made mistakes as well as the neocons. But if we go back to the 1990s, own goals were repeatedly scored by the United States, both in foreign policy where the US kept waging wars in the name of spreading democracy that caused very little good and cost trillions of dollars, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. And Trump got elected in part on a "no more wars" campaign pledge. Although, as you pointed out, he's now violated that pledge by attacking Iran. And I also think that there were significant own goals scored in domestic policy, because the United States, amid the triumphalism of the end of the Cold War, embraced neo— [unclear] orthodoxy, market capitalism, flung open the doors of trade, deregulated the economy, financialization spread widely. And what that meant is that the dislocations that were already being caused by automation and deindustrialization were ramped up by market orthodoxy and by the view that we should just let the market take its course. And so I think Trump on some level is right. Part of the reason that many Americans feel left behind is a result of bad decision-making. And as a consequence, Trump has put into place what he thinks will fix the problem, but on almost every front, Trump is making the problem worse.

00:19:37 Andrew Keen: How does foreign policy and foreign crises work in terms of the order of things? We recently had another Washington, DC–based writer, the journalist Michael Dobbs, on the show. He's the author of probably the most authoritative book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, One Minute to Midnight. He has a new book out, The Six Minute War, about how close Russia and America came to Armageddon in 1973 [as spoken: 1983]. Those, of course, '73 [as spoken: '83] and particularly the Cuban Missile Crisis were moments of order. Charles, I know this is probably rather abstract, but if there was an equivalent crisis today to the Cuban Missile Crisis or even the crisis of 1973 [as spoken: 1983], when there were a series of misunderstandings between the US and the Soviet Union, the downing of Korean jets, and various other things. Is it more likely that there would be war? In other words, when it comes to, for example, interpreting the Cuban Missile Crisis, is the reason the world escaped a nuclear Armageddon because of a relatively coherent international system?

00:20:57 Charles Kupchan: No. As someone who has realist leanings, I think the ability to avoid great power war since World War Two is primarily the product of nuclear weapons. And nuclear weapons breed caution. And that's because everyone knows that if you slip or slide or deliberately get into a war with a nuclear-armed power, it can lead to mutual destruction. And so the main reason the United States and the Soviet Union never went to full-scale war, nuclear weapons. Today, I would say that the likelihood of war between the United States and China, if nuclear weapons did not exist, would be extremely high given the clashing interest that we see. And so nuclear deterrence works, but it also creates greater dangers should deterrence fail. And we are also looking at a world in which more powers are gaining nuclear weapons. So far, not a huge number, but I do think that if Iran at some point gets a nuclear weapon or if the United States begins to retract its nuclear umbrella from Asia or from Europe, you will see a significant increase in the number of nuclear-weapon states.

00:22:34 Andrew Keen: You first came on the show back in 2021, Charles. You had a book out back then, Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World. So you're all too familiar with the tradition of American isolation. Maybe correct me if I'm wrong. You're [unclear] a hardcore isolationist, but you understand some of the forces encouraging it. If we are to bring order to the anarchy of the current international system, does it have to come through America or through international organizations? Because, of course, one of the other features of this first quarter of the twenty-first century is a crisis of international organizations, particularly the United Nations, which itself, of course, came out of the ashes of the Second World War.

00:23:31 Charles Kupchan: Well, I think that probably the single most important relationship is US-China. And it's very important that US-China move away from what has been years of increasing rivalry and confrontation to find some way to deescalate and ultimately to work together. And I give Trump credit for trying to reach out to Xi Jinping. He's had two summits with Xi already this year, and he'll have two more. One in Shenzhen, China, the APEC summit, and then another one in Miami in December, the G20 summit. And that, I think, does provide an opportunity for Trump and Xi to try to find ways to work together and not just compete. But I'm not someone who believes that the answer to the problem of order in this century is international institutions, the UN. On the contrary, I think we've seen the degree to which the UN is great at delivering day-to-day public goods, assistance of a humanitarian nature, help with health care, peacekeeping forces. But when it comes to dealing with fundamental crises, the UN, in part because it's paralyzed by the veto-wielding members of its Security Council, is paralyzed. Where has the UN been in Gaza, in the Iran war, in the Ukraine war, in many of the great conflicts of our time? Basically, a bystander. And one of the reasons that I draw on the Concert of Europe in the book that we're discussing is that it creates coalitions of the willing. It avoids the institutionalized multilateralism that has become gummed up and slow and bureaucratic in favor of putting around the table a small number of key players to try to deal with not just the crises of the day, but the longer-term challenges like climate change and managing the rollout of AI. Is it a fallback from the ideal of global cooperation envisaged in the United Nations? Yes. But I think today, we need to focus not on impossible maximums, but upon workable minimums. And that's where I think the concert and concert system comes in.

00:26:09 Andrew Keen: Isn't there something, though, Charles, problematically conservative if, well, if indeed conservatism is problematic to your arguments about going back to the Concert of Europe. Of course, the Concert of Europe was deeply conservative, dominated by conservative statesmen like Metternich, and eventually became one of the reasons for the year of revolutions in 1848, created all sorts of dysfunctional political systems. One could even argue that the Concert of Europe eventually resulted in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. So do we need to be careful? I mean, I take your point. I'm certainly no great fan of the disorder of Trump or Putin. But do we need to be a little careful of overreacting and becoming, shall we say, liberal conservatives in order to maintain an old system that maybe— maybe hasn't been born yet to borrow from Gramsci?

00:27:12 Charles Kupchan: Yeah. I mean, is the concert a pristine model that was nothing but good? Absolutely not. It was a great power club that basically discounted the power, the influence of smaller states.

00:27:34 Andrew Keen: Repressive— I mean, these were police states that mostly dominated the Concert of Europe.

00:27:40 Charles Kupchan: There— you know, the concert had its weaknesses and its shortcomings, but it did create a forum in which powers were able to work together despite ideological differences because Britain and France were liberalizing. Prussia, Russia, and Austria were absolute monarchies. Today, autocracies and democracies need to learn not just how to live comfortably with each other, but to work together. And I think the concert provides a model. The other thing I like about the example of the nineteenth-century concert is that it combines centralization through these congresses with the devolution of power to regions. Each of the members in the concert had a regional zone of influence where it had sway. And I think in the world that we're headed toward, the diffusion of power will naturally lead to zones of influence in which the major powers in different regions have more influence. And that mixture of both centralizing and regionalizing governance, I think, is the way we need to think about the next order. We need order from the bottom up, from regions, and order from the top down coming from some sort of new steering groups, what I articulate as the concert system.

00:29:11 Andrew Keen: And, I mean, where's it gonna come from if it's not the UN? Is it gonna come out of your realist framework of Chinese and American leaders meeting around a table, maybe around AI, because they share a common fear? So it's Hobbes' old argument about order coming out of fear.

00:29:32 Charles Kupchan: Well, listen. You know, I think what all of us need to do now is throw ideas into the hopper. And what I'm trying to do is to throw an idea into the hopper to try to insert it into public conversation and see if it can get traction. This is a moment as I think I've said where I think we have to have a national and an international conversation about what the next order will look like. It will not just come out of nowhere. It will come from agency. It will come from a sense of urgency, whether it's climate change or AI or tensions between the United States and China. These are first-order problems. And as a consequence, we need an urgent conversation. Exactly what I'm hoping the book will stimulate.

00:30:30 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I wonder if international systems, though, are manifestations of agency or whether they just come about. It wasn't as if the Cold War architecture came out of agency. One other difference, Charles, I wonder, between the Concert of Europe and our moment today is— you've noted that many of the major players in the Concert of Europe were themselves autocracies, but they were conservative. They favored order. Is one of the differences now that the major figure perhaps still in our anarchic system is Putin and Putin's fetishization— support, financially and militarily— of disorder. So is that a difference between Putin's kind of— autocratic system in the twenty-first century and Metternich or some of the other conservative diplomats of the early nineteenth century?

00:31:39 Charles Kupchan: If the question is, are today's international conditions conducive to the establishment of a great power steering group, the answer is no. And the main wrecker, the main spoiler is Putin. And that's because Putin is basically a revisionist leader. He wants to overturn the status quo. Concerts can function when the world is populated as you just put it, Andrew, by more conservative states, by states that are attempting to practice strategic restraint and find ways to work together, not by aggrieved states that are attempting to overturn the territorial and normative status quo. So I do think that if there is going to be a kind of functioning great power concert system, it will probably have to await the post-Putin era. That having been said, I do think that one can begin to put in place the building blocks for that kind of order. And I do think that Trump is helping because he's not ideological. He's transactional. He is reaching out to Putin. He is reaching out to Xi. There may well be a Trump, Putin, Xi trilateral summit in China in November. Many people are running around with their hair on fire saying, oh, no. It's a new Yalta. Trump is gonna throw Ukraine and Taiwan under the bus. I hope he doesn't do that, but I do think that by breaking the ice and creating these discussions across ideological and geopolitical dividing lines, he is helping us get to a point where this kind of conversation starts becoming more routinized and normalized.

00:33:39 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I would call what you call a conversation anything but national or democratic. I know you gotta run, Charles. Final question on this, Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come. It's a nice idea. It sounds fine. But then when you get into the details, you just played up the supposed upcoming conversation between Putin, Xi, and Trump. I mean, if we are indeed to bring order to anarchy, I know you're no fan of Trump or Putin or Xi, but isn't this book really a recipe for a world managed by these three autocrats of one kind or another? And if Trump gets replaced, maybe by JD Vance, Vance can replace Trump at that table. Isn't there a danger? I mean, I know you keep on talking about top-down and bottom-up systems, but, ultimately, the reality of this thing is it's gonna be dominated by these three great powers. Maybe Europe, but it seems itself in a mess at the moment. Is there a danger, in other words, Charles, to bringing order to anarchy that we're gonna see the reappearance of a real— a really conservative Concert of Europe, and that actually, in the next few years, we may be nostalgic for our own age of disorder. Final question. I know you gotta run. Easy question to come with [unclear], Charles.

00:35:07 Charles Kupchan: Yeah. I mean, I don't think that where we are today is stable. And you and I are talking just before the midterms. I think the midterms are not gonna be kind to the Republicans. And whoever comes after Trump is likely to try to restore American democracy and restore America's connections to its key allies around the world. And so, yes, I think that China and Russia need to be at the table, but so do European allies, so does India, so does Japan, so do representatives from the Global South.

00:35:48 Andrew Keen: It's gonna be a big table, Charles. A big round table.

00:35:52 Charles Kupchan: It's a big round table, but I wouldn't, you know, turn it into a new UN. I would try to keep the numbers small, and depending on the issue under discussion, put there the people that need to be there, including if we're talking about AI, the CEOs from Palo Alto. If we're talking about energy, companies that are energy companies and green energy companies. So this is a more flexible system than one that we've seen before, but I think that's the kind of multiplex world that we are headed toward.

00:36:27 Andrew Keen: In other words, maybe rather than think of it as a single table, it's like one of those wedding arrangements where you have one main table and lots of satellite ones. Well, very provocative as always, by another old friend of the show, Charles Kupchan, Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come. It's out. It's a Council on Foreign Relations book, very provocative and important. And as always, Charles, congratulations. Always nice to have you on the show. And best of luck with triggering what you call this national conversation. I may have been rather suspicious, but I couldn't agree with you more that we actually need it. So thank you so much.

00:37:05 Charles Kupchan: Thank you, Andrew. Thank you for having me on the show. It's been great to be back with you.