THE UNITED STATES, CHINA AND ALL THAT

Thomas Friedman is an American political commentator and author. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who is a weekly columnist for The New York Times. He has written extensively on foreign affairs, global trade, the  Middle East, globalisation and environmental issues. His best selling From Beirut to Jerusalem in 1989 was the winner of the National Book Award in its first edition. Keeping pace with developments in the first year of the Biden Administration in the US, on Thursday 30 September 2021, Thomas Freidman joined members of The Sydney Institute for a zoom meeting to discuss the United States and China. The text which follows is taken from an edited transcript of that meeting.

THE UNITED STATES, CHINA AND ALL THAT

THOMAS FRIEDMAN

Discussion with Thomas Friedman

Gerard Henderson: Tom, it’s great to have you back at The Sydney Institute – although on this occasion by Zoom at a time of pandemic. As our members and supporters know – you delivered our Annual Lecture in 2007. Moreover, every now and then, you have met with Anne and myself in Washington DC or Sydney. Thank you for giving generously of your time today to talk to us about “The United States, China and all that”.

First up, just give us a bit of a brief rundown on your current President and your former President. I know you’ve written about the latter in one of your most recent columns, which I read a day or so ago. In Australia, President Biden is well known. There is a view – I think it’s fair to say – that he’s not quite as sharp as he once was, when we look at the video clips from a little way back. And the question is, if it is true, does it matter? As you know, the administration, whether it’s Democrats or Republican, invariably extends beyond the personality of the President. So, how is President Biden going?

Tom Friedman: I haven’t seen the President, physically, so I can’t comment. And I’m not a doctor so I can’t diagnose him. Joe Biden is elderly. I don’t think he’s got dementia, but I think he’s old. He’s slower and he has senior moments and all of those things. But, all in all, he’s still functioning fairly well from what I’ve seen of him at public events. He has senior moments and, at 68, I have senior moments. Our last President, whatever his age was, was completely nuts. He was a sociopath. The fact that we’ve just got an elderly, normal person? I’m good with that.

Gerard Henderson: Take us through the current administration. In any administration there are some key players. Who are the key players apart from the President?

Tom Friedman: Ron Klain, chief of staff, is hugely important. Tony Blinken is Secretary of State. Jake Sullivan is National Security advisor. General Lloyd Austin is the Secretary of Defence. Janet Yellen is Secretary of the Treasury. These are the inner core. Then there’s a layer below them, almost all of whom were in the Obama/Biden administration. So, there are a lot of very familiar names who have worked together before. Bruce Reed doing domestic policy and the like. They’ve got a solid team.

Gerard Henderson: If you follow the media, not simply in Australia but in Britain, and to some extent in the United States, you get an impression that the Squad group, reflective of the left of the Democratic Party, is becoming increasingly influential. Is that the case? If it is the case, does it affect the administration?

Tom Friedman: We’ve got the Squad and the Mod Squad, like it’s all some kind of sitcom. There is a wing of the Democratic Party – it was always there – which is a very progressive left wing. It is maybe somewhat bigger now, maybe somewhat more left now. I am on record as saying during the campaign that if I could have gone anywhere, it would have been to South Carolina. I would have gone to a black church on a Sunday morning; I would have asked to go up to the choir and sit with the African American ladies there and just ask them one question; why did you lift up Joe Biden? Joe Biden’s campaign was, basically, on its last legs, until he showed up in South Carolina. With Jim Clyburn, the very influential African American congressman from there, the black community in South Carolina lifted Joe Biden up, they poured ice water on his head, slapped him around, and said “Joe, get out there and back in the race.”

And he did that. He was propelled from South Carolina right to the presidency. Why did they do that? Because they wanted a black president? Actually, no. African Americans, especially African American women, tend to be kind of conservative. I believe it was because they thought Joe Biden was the guy who could actually unify the country, bring it together. It wasn’t because they had some super left wing agenda. It was not the left that brought Joe Biden to power, they were part of it, but it was certainly not the left. And it was the fact that a certain cluster of Democratic congressman and women were able to win purple districts, that is districts with a lot of conservative voters. That’s why the Democrats now have a majority in the Senate and the House. But the party has got a very strong left wing. And they’re asserting themselves, and that’s their right.

Right now, we’re in that kind of political fight between the left and the centre of the Democratic Party; what each can give to the other. That’s what I’ve been calling for. We have two challenges right now in the US. One is to pass the laws and develop the policies that will propel America into the twenty-first century, in terms of both physical infrastructure and human infrastructure, so more people in more places can realise their full potential. That’s one challenge we have. The other challenge we have is a challenge we’ve never had before. Our second party in a two-party system has gone nuts. It has become a political cult. It puts the interests and demands of the cult leader, Donald Trump, ahead of the Constitution. I cannot tell you how worried I am about this; how dangerous it is. I’ve written about it a lot; I will continue to write about it. I just did CNN 15 minutes ago.

We are standing on a false bottom here. This place could come crashing down. 2024 could be our last truly legitimate election, if 2020 wasn’t. I don’t think you can exaggerate how dangerous this is. If you followed what happened this week. Arizona Republicans demanded a recount of votes in Maricopa County – the largest county in Arizona, highly urbanised and won by Biden, which tipped Arizona to Biden. They demanded a recount against the wishes of a lot of local officials. They brought in a pro-Trump election monitoring unit and spent months and millions of dollars recounting every vote. After all was said and done, they found out that Joe Biden actually won by 368 more votes than he was given credit for. Not that Trump won.

That evening, Donald Trump ordered the Governor of Texas to audit results in Texas. In five Texas counties, all largely urbanised, that had Democratic majorities, in a state that Trump won by almost five percentage points. The Texas Governor ordered an audit. We’re talking about tin pot dictator stuff. I can assure you, if the New York Times asked me tomorrow to do a live interview in a clown outfit standing on my head, I would actually tell the New York Times no. I’m not going to give an interview in a clown outfit standing on my head. I actually have some integrity. But the complete absence of spine, the invertebrate nature of our Republican political class today, is absolutely astounding and breathtaking. These are people who seem so wedded to their $174,000 a year jobs and free parking at Reagan National Airport that they will not risk the tiniest thing to preserve and protect our constitution.

That’s why I did my column yesterday about Liz Cheney. Along with Adam Kinzinger in Chicago, they are two Republicans out of this entire caucus of senators and congressman have been ready to stand up to Trump on principle. They demand defence of the Constitution over the wishes of the cult leader. Of course, the cult leader is trying to drive both of them out of politics. So, we’re in code red here. I don’t know what you think is going on here, but let me assure you that we are in code red. We are in danger of losing the crown jewels, our ability to legitimately transfer power in a free and fair election.

Gerard Henderson: Coming back to code red. As you know, the election outcome was close as it was when Trump prevailed over Hilary Clinton. In terms of the electoral college, Hillary Clinton got more votes, but in terms of the Electoral College it was very close on both occasions. This time, Joe Biden clearly got more votes than Donald Trump, but Donald Trump got a lot of votes. I don’t know the figures but of those Americans who voted something like 45 per cent voted Trump and 55 per cent went for Biden, as a rough calculation. If you’re talking code red as you did in your very interesting column on Liz Cheney in the Times yesterday, we might be seeing the end of the American republic. There’s a lot of people out there who are pretty agitated, aren’t there? How do you handle that?

Tom Friedman: We are a deeply polarised country. We’re not only deeply polarised, we’re almost perfectly polarised, which makes it even more challenging. The necessary thing, but not sufficient, is that Donald Trump must be removed from American politics. Whether that happens by biology or by the vote of the American people, I don’t know. There’s only one good thing about Donald Trump, God only made one of him. Oh, thank God he only made one of them. Because you actually don’t know and have never experienced, in your life, anyone as shameless, you just don’t know anyone like that. He’s completely without shame. He will lie, he will cheat and steal, and absolutely deny it. You just have never experienced anyone like it, and I actually know Trump. So, the question is, when he is gone from the scene, and one day he will be, will the Republican Party come back and revert to some kind of normal. I really don’t know.

I have a broader view of what’s going on in politics globally and America’s not immune from it at all. I believe that all the major political parties in the industrial world are blowing up. The Tories blew up – they became a Brexit Party instead of a pro-business, somewhat pro European party. Labor became Marxist, and the Liberals in the UK just disappeared. Republicans became a Trump cult. France is the only country in the world that has a leader without a party and an opposition without a leader. I have no clue who governs Italy today, but I don’t think they’re called Christian Democrats. I think Italy has had a former comedian as prime minister. And I think the Democrats too are coming unstuck, and there is a reason for this. I don’t know enough about Australian politics, but yours is still holding. Look at the German post war coalition; it just came unglued. The reason has to do with all these parties being born of the Industrial Revolution. They were born of an age of binary politics; left-right, left-right.

When the Industrial Revolution met capitalism, it was an incredible release of energy and incredibly destabilising. It took us about a century to figure out how to stabilise it. We all eventually settled on something called the welfare state. There was a Chinese version, an Australian version, a Russian version, an Eastern European version, Western European version and an American New Deal version. The welfare state was a set of walls, ceilings and floors, and politics was a left-right debate about those walls, ceilings or floors. The left said, “Let’s have high walls” on trade and the right said, “Let’s have low walls” on trade but high walls on immigration. The left said, “Let’s have a thick floor” or safety nets and the right said, “Thin floor”. Left said, “Let’s have a tight ceiling on incomes and on the pace of change”, the right said, “No ceiling”.

And left-right politics, for a hundred years, was really about those walls, ceilings, and floors. I believe what’s happened in the last decade or so is that we’ve moved on from the Industrial Revolution, we’re in a new era, we’re in what I call a new promethean era. It was spurred by a giant simultaneous technology climate change and environmental climate change – a giant release of energy that basically blew away the ceiling, blew down the walls and crashed through the floor. All these parties are disoriented. Some, to stay in power, have fallen back on tribalism, to hold their followers through more tribal identities. Others are trying to navigate new coalitions to govern in this new world. That’s the transition we’re in; you’re in it in Australia, we’re in it in America. It’s very challenging. Then, when you overlay on that a political psychopath like Trump and it becomes even more challenging. That’s how I see where we are.

Gerard Henderson: That’s a rather depressing analysis of Western society.

Tom Friedman: I can ruin any dinner party – and I do weddings and bar mitzvahs as well.

Gerard Henderson: Fortunately, it’s breakfast time here and I’ll think we’ll hang around. So, can I ask you to look beyond the United States, because in a sense, from a quite different perspective, someone who might be saying what you’re saying about the deauthorisation of the United States could well be in the leadership in China. Just reflect a while for us on the US/China relationship. It seems to me that you’re very critical – apart from Liz Cheney and one or two others – of the Republicans. And you mentioned that the United States is a very, very deeply divided society, which I think most of us would agree with. But what does seem to unite the Republicans and the Democrats and, to some extent, Trump and Biden, is a common attitude to the effect of an emerging China on the United States. Is that the one uniting factor in contemporary American society?

Tom Friedman: Well, we need to put it in context. I would say that 1979-2019 was an epoch in US-China relations. I would call it the epoch of unconscious integration. By that I mean, you could wake up as an American business and say, “I want to have a factory in Tianjin” and you could have a factory in Tianjin. “I want to have a supply chain from Dalian”, you could have a supply chain from Dalian. “I want to have my kid study at Fudan University for a semester”, your kid could study at Fudan. “I want to visit China as a tourist”. “I want to hire a young Chinese to work for me”. As a Chinese you could say “I want my company listed on the NASDAQ. I want to buy an American company and I want to have an American partner.”. For 40 years, there was a kind of unconscious integration and,, over those 40 years, China and America became the real one country, two systems. We were the real one country, two systems – not China and Hong Kong.

For 30 of those 40 years, basically, China sold us what I call, shallow goods; goods we wore on our back, shoes we wore on our feet, socks we wore on our ankles, solar panels we put on our roof. Shallow goods that didn’t go very deep. We sold China deep goods. We sold them software, computers and chips. Now, they had to buy our deep goods because they couldn’t make them themselves. Well, about 7 or 8 years ago, China started to actually make deep goods; that’s what Huawei represents. When China only sold us shallow goods, we did not care whether China’s government was authoritarian, libertarian or vegetarian. It didn’t matter to us at all, because we were just buying their shallow goods. But when they want to sell us their deep goods, Huawei, 5G, which will go into our offices, phones, sidewalk? Then, the difference in values between us really starts to matter. That’s what’s happened to US-China relations. Now that they can sell us deep goods, suddenly the difference in values and absence of trust really matters.

It does matter whether they’re authoritarian, libertarian or vegetarian. Then overlay on that the fact that China has a new leader, one who really has an ambition to be the greatest leader in modern Chinese history, superseding Mao or Deng or whoever, and who has actually decided to reassert the authority of the Communist Party of China. He’s created a situation where China today is so much more open than it was 40 years ago, but so much more closed than it was 6 years ago. There’s been this reverse. Overlay those two things: they want to sell us deep goods, but we don’t have the trust to buy them while, at home, the CCP has been reasserting its influence and actually closing China more. Then you add a world of technology where everything is now dual use. Your toaster has a sensor in it and a chip. I could listen in on your breakfast if I wanted to, while you’re toasting a bagel. We live in a world where everything is dual use and, therefore, a chip I sell you to go into a Nintendo game could actually end up in a PLA military weapons system.

When everything is dual use and you have no dual trust — that’s a prescription for a very different US-China relation. The problem is, we still are very intertwined. I was interviewing the head of Qualcomm’s legal department the other day, Don Rosenberg. Qualcomm is a big chip and software company. They actually made the inside of your iPhone. Qualcomm is a very important company. In regard to Qualcomm’s relationship with Huawei, Don said, “It’s like this, Tom. Huawei is our customer, our supplier, our partner, our shared global standard setter, our competitor and we’re suing each other.” That is a perfect description of Qualcomm’s relationship with Huawei and America’s relationship with China. We are competitors, we are co-operating and we are in conflict. Welcome to the intertwined, fused world. It’s not the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The only things we bought from the Soviet Union during the Cold War were caviar, vodka and matryoshka dolls. That was it. That was all they had to sell us. They were just a third world country with nuclear weapons, and we could deal with that. China is a whole different kettle of fish. So, managing this relationship from our side and from their side is extremely complicated.

Gerard Henderson: Before we go, I just want to ask you one other question then we’ll talk briefly about the Middle East and then we’ll go to questions and discussion. You were talking about the United States’ involvement with China in more recent years and looking at it historically. But, from Australia’s perspective and in the Pacific region, the concerns about China are not simply, as you know, are not simply like those of the United States. Our views about China would be reasonably similar to the views of South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and probably India. The projection of China’s force and influence in the region is an issue here, which goes beyond the troubled relationship between the United States and China under the Trump administration and now under the Biden administration. From your own view of the Pacific, which you’ve written about quite a lot in your time, how do you see that relationship going, vis a vis the United States in relation to those other nations.

Tom Friedman: I think Xi Jinping has really overplayed his hand. If there were a Chinese foreign affairs journal, and I were the editor, and I were free, the article I would commission is one that asked of China’s leaders: “Who lost the world?’’ “Whose idea was this?” “How is this going to work out?” “We’ve made the entire world align itself against us.” And with wolf warrior diplomats who say, “We’re not going to buy any more of your beef or your wine because you want to know where a pandemic began.” The world is drifting together away from and united against China in one way or another. They are going to be a huge market and that will remain a temptation. That will give them enormous leverage. But the countries that I think will thrive in the twenty-first century are those that can attract immigration, can attract the most energetic and best minds of the world, and who can build alliances with people. To me, China is going in exactly the opposite direction.

My view when it came to China was always: build bridges where possible, draw red lines where necessary. But people like me, with that rather moderate, centred view, are looked at as panda huggers in America these days. More and more you’re expected to be breathing anti-China fire all the time. And sometimes for good reason, but that’s very unhealthy too. Take a company like Intel. Intel earned something like 32 per cent of its income selling chips to China. It takes that income, brings it back to America and ploughs it into research, because Intel does not sell China its most advanced logic chips. They sell them a generation and a half behind. So, they take that money and plough it into their next generation of chips, which they sell in America, to our defence industry and not to China. They keep doing that, keeping a generation and a half ahead. You tell them they can’t sell to China and that’s a huge hit. Where are they going to replace that income? So, it’s a very complicated business. We need to find ways to build high walls around small islands of products that we don’t want to sell to China for national security reasons, and low walls around the rest. And not simply say, “We’re not going to sell you anything.” I think that would be a mistake.

I also believe in building people a ladder to respectability. I have suggested we let Huawei wire Idaho. Just tell Huawei, “Hey! State of Idaho, have at it. 5G everywhere. See how you do, see how it all works in three years. See if you play be the rules.’’ If it works okay, we’ll let you do Oregon and Washington too. We’re going to test you. But I do have to ask one question about US-China; what exactly are we fighting about? It’s not like China wants to occupy Chinatown in Los Angeles. It’s not like we want to control Shanghai. They’re more capitalist than we are, so, it’s not actually ideological. So, I do scratch my head some days. With the Soviet Union, I understood what we were fighting about; they wanted to export Marxist Leninism around the world. That’s not true with China, this is just the old story of an incumbent power and a rising power, and all of that.

In my own writing, I try to keep a moderate view about it. I don’t want to blow up the world, there are just too many ways and places we need China and benefit from the relationship. By the way, I was just listening to the business news in America this evening. There’s a paint shortage in America along with all kinds of supply shortages because our supply chains are completely disrupted. I think everyone should take a deep breath. I have suggested to people in the administration that Biden and Xi Jinping should have a monthly phone call. “Xi, how you doing? Why are you bugging us? Why do you keep hacking American Express? What are you going to do with all of those credit card numbers? Do a giant Amazon buy or something? Knock it off.” We need to have that kind of monthly dialogue with them. I just think that it would be really beneficial.

Gerard Henderson: Just briefly, before we go to our questions, give us your reflection on the Middle East. You’ve been very critical of Trump’s diplomacy across a whole range of things, including the TTP France partnership. In the Middle East, the United States – it wasn’t just Trump, it was the Trump administration – seemed to make some progress towards a contribution to improving the relationship between some of the Arab nations and Israel. How do you see that situation in the Biden administration? Much the same or different?

Tom Friedman: Well, I do believe the Abraham Accords were a great thing. It, kind of, fell into Trump’s lap, but they jumped on it – he and Jared Kushner. I give them full credit for that, my hat’s off to them. I think the more the Middle East looks like the European Union, the less it looks like the Syrian Civil War, and that’s a good thing. So, if the UAE and Bahrain and Sudan and Morocco want to open diplomatic and economic relations with Israel, that is only a good thing. Beyond that though – honestly there’s a lot of Middle East; there’s Afghanistan, there’s Iran, Iraq, there’s Israel, Palestine, there’s Arab-Iranian issues. On the Israel-Palestine front, I don’t see anything happening at all, I don’t see this administration getting involved and I don’t think that the parties are ready. I’m not sure they’ll ever be ready.

There’s no easy wins there. Just encouraging Israeli’s and Palestinians to try to improve the economic conditions of their people, respectively. Beyond that, we’ve got Afghanistan. I supported the withdrawal from Afghanistan; we needed to be out and I’m glad we’re out. Iraq has a very important election coming up and I’ve been watching that closely. The big question is, what is the future of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal? Trump made a gigantic strategic error in partnership with Bibi Netanyahu in tearing up the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. It was a huge mistake, and the fruit of that mistake is coming to harvest now because Iran, once the deal was broken, has gone ahead and begun enriching uranium; to 20 per cent, some to 60 per cent. People believe it may be weeks away from having a sufficient uranium for a bomb.

Now, it doesn’t have a warhead yet, and that would take a year, year and a half, but the whole purpose of the JCPOA was to have a year that would keep Iran a year away from breakout capability. It’s not clear Iran wants to go back to the deal and we’re in the window, right now, of will there be another deal or not. If there isn’t, then we’re in the window of some really scary stuff. Because then, Israel might act alone – Israel might act in concert with us, we might have to act. So, that’s a much more dangerous story. We’re kind of consumed right now, internally, in the United States, with all our problems and I’m as concerned as the next person. But I would say two big changes have happened out there. One is that the Iran deal may indeed be permanently unstuck and that takes us into a whole new area. And the basic understanding between the United States and China over Taiwan over the last 40 years, that we won’t formally recognise Taiwan and you won’t formally invade Taiwan. I think that too is coming unstuck. And the world isn’t waiting around for our domestic politics to sort itself out. So, those are two very big geopolitical worrisome issues out there.

Questions and Discussion

Question: I remember in this world of micro shadows that about a decade ago, speaking at The Sydney Institute, you were fairly confident that a country that censored the internet, like China, wouldn’t run the world. How’s your confidence now about that and do you think in the end it will be China that fails rather than conquers?

Tom Friedman: It’s a very good question. One of the problems one always has in these things is, “Who declared this year the end of history?” So, part of me says let’s just see how this plays out, that this could look very different in the era of AI. China could be doing well today by controlling the internet, because it only controls certain parts of it — but it doesn’t control things that really crimp innovation. But that sort of control could become very problematic in the future, with AI. Given the spread of smartphones and the Internet it gets harder – and more costly – every year to censor 1.4 billion people. That’s one answer. My other answer to you though, is a much more serious answer that applies to Australia, America and the West in general. 2007 was a very important year, I talked about it in my last book, it’s when Facebook, Twitter, the iPhone, the Cloud, Github, Hadoop, Bitcoin, all of these amazing technologies emerged. It was a pivotal year in world history. So, in my book The Lexis And The Olive Tree, which is the first book I spoke at your Institute about, I actually defined this place called Cyberspace.

I said cyberspace is a realm where we’re all connected but no one is in charge. And China woke up in 2007, this pivotal year, and said, “No, no, no. There will be no place in China where we’re all connected and no one’s in charge. We are going to project our values into our cyberspace.” So, in China’s cyberspace, on Sina Weibo, their Facebook/Twitter, you can’t be anonymous. You have to be as Anne Henderson or Tom Friedman, number one. Number two, a currency – outside of the control of the government? Called bitcoin? Not a chance. Telegram an app where anyone can send encrypted messages that the Chinese government can’t police? No way. So, what did China do in 2007? It projected its values into cyberspace; its Chinese communist authoritarian values. Be they what they were. What has the West fundamentally failed to do? We have not projected our democratic values into cyberspace. What we do instead is just say, “Mark, Cheryl, please, please do the right thing. Please, pretty please. If we talk nice about you, will you please do the right thing with Facebook? Pretty please?”

So, one of the fundamental failures of Western democracies is that we have not projected our values into our cyberspace. So, it looks like no one is in charge, but, actually, no government is in charge. But when no government is in charge, it means the companies are in charge. And when the companies are in charge, they don’t do things, necessarily, in the civic, best interests of communities. They do what’s in their profit interests. To me, your question really falls in that bucket. Will China benefit from the fact that it has no Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green in the People’s Congress who thinks that Jewish space lasers cause forest fires – like we do in our Congress? Or if they do have someone like that, they are not allowed to be on the internet spreading that filth. We have the vaccination rate we have today, which is far below what it needs to be, because we have so many anti vaxxers using social media to spread fundamental untruths.

So, we haven’t figured this out at all, and it could well be the death of us. I’m not on Facebook, I’m not on Twitter – I use it as a broadcast platform, but I don’t look at Twitter. I don’t get my news from Twitter, I’ve never looked at Facebook, and I’ve never smoked a cigarette. And my plan is to die saying all three. They are signs of the apocalypse, for the most part. They’re a net negative. I realise they have positive aspects, but Facebook would tell you, “We are net positive”, and I would tell you Facebook is net negative. Because, collectively these social networks are destroying our cognitive immunity. They’re destroying our cognitive immunity, not to mention our Covid-19 immunity, our ability to discern truth from falsehood and fact from fiction. And you cannot maintain a modern democracy without cognitive immunity.

Question: You used the word integrity; do you think the United States media is performing with integrity? The second question: the topic when you spoke to us at The Sydney Institute’s annual dinner many years ago was “The World Is Flat”. How would you describe the world these days?

Tom Friedman: Since the media encompasses everything from Breitbart and Fox News to The New York Times, I don’t think you can generalise. There’s media that believes that it is its responsibility, wherever possible, to correct errors and separate news from opinion. In that media, I’d put the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, CBS and NBC – I think they do better at that. They’re not perfect at all, but they do an okay job. Many days far better than okay. You have another set of media in this country that are trucking in falsehoods, that are not fact based at all, and I think they’re a danger to our democracy. On your second question, I get this question a lot on zoom calls, and I have to chuckle a little bit, because I’m in Bethesda, Maryland. You’re in Sydney. And we’re talking to each other like we’re next door and people ask me is the world still flat? Oh baby, it’s flatter than ever. Remember, I wrote that book in 2004, before Facebook, Twitter, the iPhone even were invented.

The world is flatter than ever, in the sense that I defined flat. We’ve created a technological platform on which more people in more places can compete, connect and collaborate on more things for less money with greater ease than ever before. In that sense, the world is flatter than ever. There are a few other things now too. It is faster than ever, the pace of change is really fast, because of what’s different in this new Promethean era I mentioned from the previous Promethean moment, i.e. the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was based on a single technology, originally a steam engine, and then the combustion engine, electrification, indoor plumbing and so on. All of these were additive, they grew in an additive way, and you got a better steam engine, it was 10 per cent better and you got a better toilet, more electricity and you got more interesting combustion engines. They were additive.

What’s happening in this promethean moment is, basically, an ecosystem of chips, sensors, software, bandwidth and AI, and they are not additive, they’re multiplicative. That cycle just keeps going around, getting smarter, faster, richer, deeper than ever before. So, the world is getting really fast, it’s getting really fused. We’re not just flat now, we’re not just interconnected, we’re not even just interdependent, we’re fused in ways we’ve never been before. It’s also getting really deep. You may have noticed we suddenly added the adjective “deep’’ to everything. There’s no global lexicographer who ordered it, but suddenly people are saying “deep fake, deep mind, deep research, deep medicine, deep everything.’’ Why is that? Because technology we intuit is going so deep in us. It’s going to places we never imagined, places that felt like science fiction before – “Oh that’s not just a fake. Gerard, is that you? Or is that a deep fake? I don’t even know anymore.”

That’s deep. In fact, it’s entered our popular culture; the song that won the Oscars two years ago by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper was called “Shallow”. But what was the main verse? “I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in, I’ll never meet the ground. Crash through the surface, where they can’t hurt us, we’re far from the shallow now.” We are far from the shallow now. Technology is going really deep. So, we’re getting fast, fused, deep, radically open. Now, anybody can play, anybody can be a broadcaster, paparazzi, TV star, film, anybody can play. And the world’s getting radically smart, through AI, so that machines can now out think humans. My next book is about how you grow up in a world that’s fast, fused, deep, open and smart. That’s the governing challenge, I believe, of the twenty-first century.

Question: I was very interested in your comments about China, but I didn’t hear anything about the rapid, very strong build-up of military over more recent years, and the effect that’s having on people’s perceptions.

Tom Friedman: The broad answer to you is that there’s no great power in history that’s amassed the economic power that China has, that wouldn’t and didn’t translate it into military power and a desire to shape the world in its own image. That’s what you see with China. So, its build-up is certainly concerning, and it’s so concerning that we brought Australia into the twenty-first century nuclear submarine age as a counterbalance. Again, I kind of regret all this. It is a huge waste of resources for Australia, frankly. We shouldn’t have to spend your money on nuclear powered subs that won’t be delivered for many years. But there you have it, that’s human nature and geopolitics. I just hope we can contain it, so we don’t waste all our money on that at a time when we’re going to have to combat climate change and we’re going to have to really deliver a decent life for so many more people around the planet.

Question: Have the American people abandoned the idea of US exceptionalism, and extrapolate about how you see Taiwan playing out?

Tom Friedman: It’s hard to speak about the American people in a way I could have done 50 years ago, growing up in Minnesota. We’re a deeply polarised nation, and there are people who couldn’t care less about American exceptionalism. There are other people, like me, and maybe some of its generational, who believe we do have a mission in the world to be a beacon of freedom and democracy, a free press, and free markets. I wish I could give you a better report card, but I can’t. I’ve never been more worried about my country. The wheels can come off here, I can’t stress that enough. The wheels could really come off. I really don’t know about Taiwan. Taiwan’s adopted what they call a “porcupine strategy”; having enough missile systems, enough tanks, enough rockets, so that every morning China will look at Taiwan and say, “Eh, not today. I don’t think I want to wrestle that porcupine today.” That’s what they’ve been doing. How long that will last, I don’t know, but that’s been their approach. As one citizen, I believe it would be very important for us to defend Taiwan: it’s independence, it’s democracy. It’s a remarkable country.

Question: In On Contradiction and Practice, Mao spoke about a 100 year strategy, and we seem to be 80 years into China’s strategy. I’m just wondering, to what extent, has China lost its strategic discipline in trying to shake the world? Because it certainly seems to have backfired.

Tom Friedman: That’s a very good question, and I’m asking myself the same thing, which is, “Hey China, I don’t get this. I don’t get how you think this is going to work out for you, if every one of your neighbours is frightened of you, and you have no allies, only vassals.’’ Even the Russians who have got this alliance with them, they know that they are very much second-class citizens and that China would have no problem devouring part of Siberia. So, we’re still early in this. But every day I pick up the news from China, and I see something new that I know is alienating somebody. I just really wonder how that is going to work out to their advantage in the long term.

Question: You mentioned the phrase “code-red” in terms of domestic politics and the potential rise again of Trump. Trump can’t come back on his own. He needs, I would have thought, quite a few other supporters and stars to align in a miraculous way. To what extent do you see the far right and extremist groups, and even the less formal groups like QAnon type movements and the Proud Boys etc., as a real risk of getting more and more organised and actually making it happen for Trump over there.

Tom Friedman: I’m not worried so much about that. Trump has supporters – 77 per cent of Republicans say the election was stolen. So, let’s say he has support of 85 per cent of Republicans today, but there are 15 per cent of Republicans who don’t support him anymore. In a tight election that can really mean a lot. If the Democrats can nominate someone who has the NBA League minimum ability to appeal to the centre right, I don’t think Trump can win again. The problem is, Biden is old and it’s unlikely he’ll run again. Kamala Harris has not demonstrated her ability to be the next President of the United States, to put it bluntly. So, there’s a real worry; what is going to happen if Biden doesn’t run, but she insists on running? She can’t win. There’s a lot of uncertainty. Which gets back to where I started, which is why Democrats have to do everything they can to make Biden’s administration a success, to propel it forward, and to give whoever succeeds him a decent running start.

Question: I read your articles in the Financial Review and I think your international perception is really interesting. But it does feel to me that you’re missing some of themes that are going on. While you might describe Donald Trump as abysmal and so forth, I think you could put those characteristics on to any politician. My question is what about some of his policies? Are they going to survive? Whether it’s border security, taxation, or deregulation? I thought they were good policies, and I think a lot of people separated them from the person. Are those policies popular still?

Tom Friedman: Some things are true, even if Donald Trump believes them. I supported his China policy. My view is that Donald Trump is not the American president that Americans deserve, but he was the American president China deserved. So, I supported him on China. I supported him on corporate taxes; I supported him on UAE-Israel and, on the border, I more or less supported him. I’m for a very high wall at the border, but with a very big gate. Secure the border, and then, I believe if you want to come into America, you have to ring the doorbell, just like if you want to come into my house. I’m pro-immigration, but I believe you’ve got to control the border, otherwise you can get a consensus on immigration. So, there are things he did that I think were right. Then there’s things he did that are tragically wrong; tearing up JCPOA, cancelling TPP. I supported him in taking on China, but not alone. I wanted him to do it with the world, based on universal principles, not US tariffs. On these policy questions, you’re absolutely right, these are things that were in the mainstream of Republican politics, and even centrist politics, and we should look at them. But do not fool yourself. This is no ordinary politician. We have never had a president who claimed that a free and fair election – one that was certified by Republican vote-counters, Republican judges, and by a Supreme Court with a new majority that that he appointed — that it was a fraud.

Question: How is the Republican Liz Cheney going to go in Wyoming?

Tom Friedman: Well, she’s running against eight other people. It’s like the Star Wars bar crowd out there in Wyoming, that she’s running against. Wyoming is the most pro-Trump state in America. Think about that. What Liz Cheney is doing, is in the most pro-Trump state in America. It’s also probably the freest gun state in America. Democrats and independents can vote in the Republican primary, so it is possible for her to win – all you need is a plurality. She could get re elected with 25 per cent of the vote. But Trump is running against her and he’s endorsing her opponent. We’ll just have to see. I’ve known Liz for a long time, and we disagree on 90 per cent of things. But what she is doing is remarkable. She is risking her life, all the policies she stands for and her job, to call this man out for his absolute abuse of our Constitution, and our election process. That lady has integrity. Unfortunately, she’s in a party with way too many people who do not. This has nothing to do with left-right politics, or taxes or no taxes, this has to do with way too many people who have put their own interests and the interests of a corrupt man ahead of the Constitution.

Gerard Henderson: Well time is up. A great discussion Tom. On behalf of Jacquelynne Willcox, our Chair, our board, Anne, the staff here, and all our members, many thanks for giving so generously of your time and giving such an informed analysis. We’d love to have you back some time in the future, but for this morning here and tonight there, many thanks.