The World in 2025 with Peter Frankopan and Emily Maitlis: Making Sense of our Past, Present and Future (Part Two)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet.

This is a second instalment of our in-depth discussion. Intelligence Squared Premium subscribers can get access to the full-length conversation, including content that isn't available anywhere else. Head to intelligencesquared.com forward slash membership to find out more or hit the IQ2 Extra button on Apple. Now let's rejoin our host, Emily Mateness, live on stage in conversation with Peter Frankopan. Are you talking about a narrative or are you saying...

I mean, are we going to freak everyone out in this room if we say that is actually going to be the story now of the next quarter of the 21st century? That the West, as we think of ourselves, is a much less relevant place.

voice in the whole debate. Do you mean from a socio-economic point of view or from a point of view of our vision of what democracy means? I mean from an everything point of view. I mean that if you've got

the most populous countries, if you've got the strongest autocracies, if you've got people hungry to be part of some... You know, the story you've just told is like, OK, I can go to the Commonwealth. Oh, isn't it lovely? You know, King Charles. Or I can just kind of talk to these guys about oil and technology and everything that's next. And they're going there. I mean, is that...

Is that going to be the story now? That we are going to be much less relevant to the future of the economic conversation, maybe the climate conversation, certainly the democratic conversation in the next 20 years?

Well, my lovely wife always says, make sure you stay positive and make everybody upbeat. I mean, look, just on numbers, okay, so there are about 60 million of us here. Robert Jenrick probably tops it up slightly differently, but give or take 60 million in the UK, 65 million. There are 4 billion in Asia. So mouths to feed.

cookers to heat, rooms to, you know, everything. In terms of the natural resources, forget about fossil fuels, where it's concentrations, you don't need a genius to work out Saudi, UAE, etc., etc. You know who Europe's biggest oil supplier is at the moment? India.

And guess where the oil is coming from? All from Russia, bootlegged and pushed around the side. So I think that the sheer weight of numbers of resources, that's in rare earths too. So... I mean, you've just touched on something which I don't know will take us off, but it's interesting, is the whole question of natalism, right? The fertility rates. And you will see sort of Europe's most autocratic leaders talking about...

you know, Orban, all the rest of it, go and have babies. You'll hear JD Vance, go and have babies. You know, you're a child cat lady if you don't, you know, go and have babies. But this is part of the story, isn't it? That we're not...

we're not even producing our next generation. Well, that's probably... They'll have to ask us back for a second talk on that one. I mean, it is interesting in the kind of the world of now that the European leaders who have managed to position themselves to be as friendly with the president of China, in many cases Russia and Washington, are those ones that we raise our nose up here. Meloni, Orban, Vucic.

I think they're the ones who look like they're sitting pretty. So, look, I think as far as Asia goes, China in 2000 had about 6% of global manufacturing. By the end of this decade, it's going to be about 50%. Right, that's pace of growth, the ability to keep on, not just through demographics. There is a longer-term peak on that, on carbon emissions, etc., etc. Those are really important parts of the longer term. But as far as we are right now...

I think it's that all these countries are very different. They are autocratic in different kinds of ways. Iran, bearded, Shia, humorless militia, oligarchs in Russia holding up a kind of estate on puffs of air and a Marxist-Leninist state in China.

and, you know, then Brazil, South Africa, et cetera, UAE, they're all extremely different, but they don't have the democratic process of being able to boot their leaders out. And all of these regimes have as their sort of single guiding principle, you could call it stability if you're part of one of those states,

but staying in power is the kind of thing that drives all of them. So do you think democracy will become niche? I mean, you talk about this on newsagents a lot, right? I mean, one of the things that's most striking this year of great elections, more people going to the polls ever in history, unless I'm wrong, it's basically impossible at the moment for a ruling government to stay in power.

I mean, conservatives gone, Biden gone, France gone, Schultz going to be gone, Poles gone. All over the world. The only kind of exceptions I think are in Greece, growing incredibly quickly, and Mexico. But to look at where democracies are really flourishing, doing well, people are satisfied, happy, think the direction of travel is right.

And there are lots of things that underpin that. I do think it's always the economy that drives, do you feel that the world of tomorrow is going to be better for your children than it is, or for you, for your children, the next generation than it is today? And if the answer to that is no, then you take different kinds of decisions. But is the answer ever yes? I mean, what you've set out is what's happened in 2024, which is that the incumbents have been thrown out. Now, you can say...

In each case, you know, huge inflation made a very obvious story. Maybe it was the same story, you know, throughout the world that people are asked if they're better off than they were four years ago and they say no and out goes the government. But I wonder how often people go, yes, this is going really well and they re-elect.

Well, it does happen, but I mean... Is it happening less? That's my question. Are we basically becoming, as an electorate...

just fickle with whoever is in power? Do we just hate whoever is in power? That's got to be part of it, right? And that's partly driven through social media, that's partly through special interests, a vast amount of money thrown at elections. I was looking at some stuff on Sunday about spending by owners of American football teams on the election and it's gone up seven times this election compared to last time.

So people who wanting to influence or to chip in with the you know with the with the the part of the side that's going to win I think the US is a different story to Europe, you know here here in Europe if we can't get our act together and I mean UK within Europe, whichever shape or form, you know We're not part of the EU but if we Europeans can't work out how to unite and devise common policy with a war on our doorstep and

uh horrors in the Middle East and you know total total devastation of the population of Palestine and now Lebanon almost certainly the West Bank that's going to follow and an American president saying we're going to pull out of NATO we're going to detach and we'll put tariffs on Europe you know it looks to me that Europe shrivels the United States the bit that's odd to me is I've never seen the United States this powerful in my entire lifetime in terms of its Technologies in terms of you know

per capita GDP in terms of quality of life. I mean, yeah, don't rush over that because I think the GDP is about 80,000...

Yeah. Dollars, right? And so, you know, I've just been sort of out there covering the election and you hear the story on the doorstep about, you know, the terrible state of economics. And then we're kind of doing the calculations. We're like, oh, my God, don't tell them what our average wages, don't tell them what our GDP is. Yeah, I mean, look, I was in Ireland 10 days ago and Irish per capita GDP is about $100,000 a head. It's about almost three times the U.K.,

Right, if you're a writer, if you're creative, you pay no tax because the Irish government want to subsidize, you know, want to encourage people to be creative. They've headquartered Apple, Google, Facebook, you know, you name it, all in Europe. For now. They've come off. That'll be interesting, won't it? And you speak to anybody in Dublin, whether they're an economist or a taxidermist or a guy behind the bar, it's like, if that day comes and they all pull out and head to the Faroe Islands or whatever. Or back to America if regulations are cut. We had it good.

So now if you look at Europe on its own, Bratislava, Warsaw and Prague are richer than every single part of the United Kingdom apart from central London.

And if you are a child of the Cold War like we are, if you'd said that in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, that these parts of Europe that had been suppressed, oppressed, shut down, riddled with corruption, riddled with communist cadres spouting Karl Marx, didn't know how to do or make anything work, and the fact that sheer hard work, being willing to go and be plumbers here, there, whatever, going to build up their economies, think strategically, and invest in the defence, say Poland spends about 4% of GDP on defence,

But that vision of where we need to get to as a country has been something that has been conspicuously short here in the UK, I think, but also in many other parts of Europe too. And that sclerotic, paralysed thinking, it's not clear to me how the cardiac arrest

Yeah, it's really interesting you say that because what they have had is that break with the past. Yeah, I think that's right. A forcible change. And we haven't had that. You know, we're very proud of the tube because it was the first tube and we're still living on something that was built in the 1850s, right? I guess that, I mean, is that part of the problem? That we...

you know, we haven't had the shock to the system. I mean, I guess I'm asking really, what is the thing that reboots us? Well, I don't, I mean, I think some of it is that we don't always understand, I mean, it sounds, you know, we don't,

have all the information that I think we should do. So, for example, if you were to say most people in this audience, do you think an American university education is more expensive than the British one? We'd all go, yeah, I know the Ivy League is really expensive, and the UK, the fees are going to go up a bit, but still much cheaper here. On average, a graduate from a British university leaves with double the debt of an American graduate student.

How? Because lots of teaching in the United States is in-state, so it's cheap fees or no fees. Lots of these endowments in Harvard or whatever, Harvard's endowment is $60 billion. At Oxford, if you talk about all the colleges that sometimes help each other, but often they don't, Oxford's flat endowment is about $2 billion. Add it all together, $8 billion, $7 billion, something like that. So Harvard is seven, eight, nine times bigger and going to get...

you know, get larger and larger. Notre Dame, great university, it's more than double the size of Oxford. And that means that your capacity to subsidise, your capacity to provide better food, your capacity to have better facilities, better recruit, better staff. And I think

It's either that our life is getting harder for us, and the ways to kind of reboot it like the Chancellor's been trying to do, and previous Chancellors have been trying to do, you know, I'm not here to pick a political side, is to try to stretch what we've got as far as we can. But it looks to me that our costs keep going up, and our revenues keep coming down. So again, this afternoon, I've been doing stuff on this Chinese ship, or the Chinese ship in the Baltic.

And our Defence Secretary this afternoon has decided to announce to scrap two amphibious ships, fleet tankers, a frigate. They're all getting some of the chinoops, some of the pumas, to save 500 million pounds over five years because we've got to start saving money. And so it feels a bit like Downton Abbey where we're in series four, where all the staff are used to pluck the goose and have, you know, feed, what's he called, Lord Grantham and stuff him up. Everyone's getting a bit thinner now.

And so there does need, I think, to be quite a radical set of policies that come in. And it doesn't matter for me whether it's left or right. I mean, ideally for me, somewhere in the center to avoid revolution. But you can see how that tinder gets dry. And in lots of places like Netherlands, France, Le Pen, and so on, the support for very radical people who want to do things that dismantle the state, like Trump has talked about, is real. Yeah.

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Is a bit of you excited by whatever happens now in America? Do you watch and think, what he's doing is...

is tearing up the whole system. It's the wrecking ball to the whole system. We know he doesn't believe in the Department of Energy. He's put in a fossil fuels guy. He wants to. We know he doesn't believe in the Department of Education. He's put in the World Wrestling Foundation. He doesn't believe that the people who are in prison for January the 6th should be in prison. He wants to put in somebody who's still facing questions over sex abuse and all the rest of it.

I mean, is a bit of you kind of just standing back and saying, yeah, bring it on. You know, let's see if this is an extraordinary reset of the kind that we've never been through, we've never imagined. Yeah, I probably should be. But I think historians, we love revolutions in studying them. But, you know, be careful what you wish for.

First. Second, I hope that that sort of scale of dislocation doesn't happen, because taking that medicine that fast is hard. But I mean, the big problem is that we're in an age of multiple revolutions. So the geopolitical, the shift of power to the east and where Europe fits, and are we here to put the brakes on the Americans? Britain now outside EU, obviously have got much less ability to be

a partner for all of our partners. Anyway, we could have played an important role. Do you believe that? Do you believe that Trump will not listen to the UK outside the EU or that we have a special place because we're outside the EU? I think Trump's worldview... Trump tried to buy Greenland. He'll make us an offer we can't refuse and, you know...

Every now and again I get on the tube and there's somebody speaking Danish and I go, "You know, the Danes come back. You did quite a good job in the 11th century before the Normans came, you know, social, sexual equality." I mean, look, the Romans used to grow all that wine. All that wine. Yeah. So I think the challenge is how you slot that kind of reform around major climate reorganisations which are not just about rising sea levels and hurricanes and storms and chilly evenings in London but the substantial change that's going on, you know. I mean, I've written about that.

I think that that's one thing. Then things like new technologies, robotics, AI, and the productivity and the gains, the shock to jobs and productivity, as well as the upsides that come with it. I think it's just, we're in a time of enormous turbulence, and therefore the decisions, if they're radical, can sink you as much as they can refloat you. And you'd probably want the cleverest people in the room around you

maybe some of them can be the richest people in the room as well, but you want to have some diversity. And I don't think Trump appeals to diversity in the same way that we've had problems in this country too in the last 15, 20, 30 years of the tribalism of a party that's in power not reaching across over the walls. And I think that that's a real worry.

I swear I lose the room a bit, but I was speaking to Steve Bannon a few months ago, and weirdly I kind of keep an eye on what he's saying and doing because he's proved oddly right about things that I originally sort of dismissed. And he said, look, don't get hung up about NATO. Trump's not going to leave NATO. That's not the deal. But look at what you're all doing now. You're all kind of, you know...

coming to the table, everyone's talking about their numbers, you know, Keir Starmer's pledged it, but we still don't know when we're going to be spending 2.5. Does that, I mean, in the big scheme of things, is that relevant or is it tiny? It's what you spend it on.

As a bulk number, that's fine. But you've got to understand what 2040, 2050 looked like. And I've been involved in some of those in the integrated review of trying to think about what we need to do in this country. And the report gets done and it more or less gets buried. It gets refreshed every now and again.

but some of the platforms that you need for advanced weapon systems, for what you need at sea, are changing incredibly quickly, and they take 20, 30 years to come into play. So you need to have a pretty good idea of where you think the world's going to go and some of those megatrends. And you can get that if you ask the right people or ask for lots of people to come and think about it and talk about it. But I think that we probably haven't got that right here. And, you know,

I mean, one of the amazing things about Silicon Valley, as you all know, is that the hook line about Silicon Valley was almost unlimited sunshine and unlimited US Defense Department money. And most of the knock-offs and spin-offs have come through. So yesterday, US Army bought a pretty nondescript, unknown drone company, and so we're all scrambling to work out what it is about it that they do that's so different and so exciting.

to think about. And so I think trying to be nimble, trying to get the best young minds, young brains to come and work for you is key. And I think it was Warren Buffett who said earlier this year, he said, probably in a functional democracy, you don't want the hundred brightest PhD students to all become working out how to move

a nanosecond closer to be able to play the markets. So all those brains who work in quantum physics, in quantum computing, are all hired by big banks to try to make margins, to try to make bigger profits, rather than where does this fit within our global ecosystems. So I'm not completely dispirited. There are lots of exciting and good things that are going on.

But the challenge is how to think big and think bravely. And, you know, again, without being party political, what you'd hope is in government that comes in, whichever colour and persuasion, with a big majority, that they will be brave early on and say, "We're going to set out our stall. This is what we're going to do." And, you know, maybe that's coming over the winter or over the new year.

I think we're not on our own in the UK in finding it difficult to navigate, to explain what is it that we want. Where is the UK, where is Europe in 2030, 2040, 2050? And a lot of the places I go to, Kazakhstan, countries in Southeast Asia, UAE, they all have a kind of, this is where we're going. UAE and their Falcon AI system, it's absolutely world class. It's right up there with anything that Meta's doing.

You know, Meta have already spent 15 times more on the Metaverse than NASA spent putting man on the moon. And so those kinds of things mean how do you act nimble? And if you want to feel pleased about history and excited, we're a little rock in the North Atlantic and we're able to harness brains and ability. It's true also slavery and exploitation of other peoples and so on. And I don't say that in a glib way, but the

The British from 1600, 1700 worked out how to make sure they were in the right place at the right time to enrich themselves, enrich the empire, make Britain secure.

And Theresa May said that at her first press conference when she became Prime Minister. She said, "Britain's greatest days lie ahead of us." So as a historian, I thought, "Ooh, that's going to be interesting," because most of the Conservative Party seemed to think that Britain's greatest day was in the Victorian... -Good old days. -But maybe we're coming back from British Empire 2.0, and everyone in this room will know the only empire that's come around twice is the Bulgarians. They had an empire twice. But the British, we could follow in their footsteps, Eurovision.

2025.

You know what, we have a flag in our office which just says, "These are the good old days." And actually, there is a sort of point to that, which is you don't know how good it is until it isn't, right? But the world keeps spinning. The sun rises every day. And one can be, you know, get into a fog. It's, "What should we do?" And it's, "How should we be educating?" And if you've got kids going through school, as some of you in the room will do, or grandchildren, or nephews, nieces, and so on,

they're basically learning the same things that we learned in the same way, give or take. They've got an iPad they can hand their essays in. And you think that's bad? I don't think it embraces the 21st century. I mean, we in Oxford, we have a... I'm missing my seminar series this evening. You know, it's presented by someone who reads out a script with slides behind in 1D.

or 2D, and this morning I went to go and see a guy who's one of the world's leading experts in augmented reality, and I stepped into a world, I stepped on, I stood on the same bed with the Titanic in front of me, and it's kind of, oh my god, this is how

how you can learn in a completely different way. We've got these tools where young people can be inspired and challenged in different kinds of ways. So, yeah, I think starting with education, there are worse places to reboot the system. We're going to take questions from all of you now. I think we've got some roving mics and I'll take a few at a time and sort of throw them all in a batch to Peter. But I'm just going to start with one that we've had online already.

Is there any particular passage or moment of history that helps us, you, understand Trump?

Well, someone like Jesse Armstrong would say the Roman Empire. You know, unlimited power. But my favourite... Jesse Armstrong of Succession. Sorry, of Succession. Well, and Peep Show and many others. I mean, he's a genius. Of Peep Show. That's where it all came from. That's where it came from. My favourite would probably be Chinggis Khan. Not because of the rape and pillage, which, you know, you have to read my book about the Silk Road, so that's not quite as we...

But the Mongols understood, well, the selective use of being unpredictable and volatile and occasional uses of extreme force to concentrate mines. And weren't they very good at not raising taxes? They were fiscal conservatives.

So the Mongols took down trade barriers, they encouraged people to trade, they were very good on patronage of the arts. They were, I wouldn't say softies, but they were very good at building inclusive societies and doing the stuff that we find very difficult here of welcoming minorities and trying to be meritocratic. There was a little golden circle around Chinggis Khan, as there is around Trump, they're called Nuku, they were the kind of

Bro culture, I guess. They were all men. I think that the Mongols and the being difficult to read, and I think that that is a challenge. I mean, all the press in China since Trump's election, I mean, Trump has a Chinese name which has a play on words. He's often called Trump, builder of the nation, because when he put tariffs on China, the Chinese did what the American government does, which is throw money at businesses, innovators, to come up with new ideas.

The picture where he'd been shot with his fist in the arm was captioned across all social media in China saying, "All power to the proletariat." Because it looked like a Maoist...

Whatever. So I think that they can't tell. It's absolutely split in Beijing, in the think tank's world, about whether Trump is going to be a dealmaker who will listen to whatever. There's a lot of chat about whether Elon Musk is the Henry Kissinger du jour, who is going to be brokering deals and calming down and helping, or whether it's all going to...

go to shit for want of a better word but I think that that unpredictability has a real value if you're trying to get things done. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

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