From liberal peace to new Cold War? Turbulence and conflict in the 21st century
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Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Okay, everybody, I think we'll get going.

Thanks very much for coming along. Nice to see you all here. Firstly, I'll introduce myself. My name is Professor Michael Cox. I've been here at the LSE for 22 years in the International Relations Department. Then in LSE Ideas, I was a co-founder back in 2008 with...

one of the great historians now unfortunately living in the United States called Arne Westad. So it's very good to be here again tonight. I've chaired quite a lot of meetings in this particular room, spoken at it many times, so it's great to be back here. It's nice to see a large number of people here this evening. Welcome to this event. It's organised by the Ralph Miliband Programme.

It's probably one of the oldest programmes of lectures which has been hosted at the LSE since I think 1996, Milena, I think we were talking about this the other day. It was funded, we always need to know the funding for Transparify or Transporify, Transparency, by a Hong Kong businessman who decided that he, like Ralph Milliband, even if he didn't agree with Ralph's politics, which were Marxist,

which shows you there must have been some very good people in Hong Kong at that time. And he had been a student of Ralph's here at the school. Many of you probably may know a bit about Ralph Miliband. Some of you may not. So let me just say something about who he was. Ralph was born, not with that name Ralph, he was actually born with the name Adolf. He was Polish-Jewish.

He moved to Belgium, this was before the Second World War, obviously, and escaped from Belgium as the Nazis occupied the Low Countries. He managed to get out almost on the last boat from mainland Europe and arrived in Britain without speaking a word of English. He spoke Polish and he still held a Polish passport, by the way, which was very interesting. He later naturalised, of course, British.

He served in the Royal Navy during World War II and he was one of those who landed with the Allied troops on D-Day for the liberation of Europe. He was a remarkable man. I actually had the privilege of knowing him a little bit in those old days of the 1970s when we argued about all sorts of desperately important things to do with Marxism.

Ralph was a very great man and he came under the influence of a man called Harold Lasky at the school. Some of you may not know about Harold. Harold was again a great socialist at that period and he took Ralph under his wing quite literally and he did his first degree here and then others work on French revolutionary thought and then Ralph got a job here in 49 and was at the school then until 1972.

when he left. He was a really quite remarkable guy. I did meet him a few times in the 1970s at conferences. And I was that time, by the way, just a little autobiography. I was in Belfast, in Queens, not the most peaceful place to be, I have to say, but a great place to be, I have to say, a great university in a great part of the world. And I met Ralph and I brought him over to do a lecture there at the time. So I got to know him.

a wee bit. And obviously too, some of you may know, you may not know about Ralph, but you may also know about his two sons, David Miliband and Ed, who now serves in the Labour camp. So he's a very, very interesting family and I also knew Ralph's wife very well. So it's a great privilege from my point of view, and I've served on the committee longer than anybody, I think,

since I first arrived at the school and I still serve on the committee with a number of very fine people. We've been running this lecture series for many years, as I said, so I'm very delighted tonight to continue in that great, what I call the great Ralph Miliband tradition.

I remember once Ralph saying to me in the kind of the avuncular way that he tended to talk to me, very nice, he said, "Don't study international relations, Mick, it's a rotten subject."

I remember him telling me that. He said, "It's full of right-wingers." Now, I'm not sure if he was right or not. I always remember him telling me that, by the way. Maybe because he had some views about what IR was at the LSE. I don't know about it. It's an interesting story. Because he really wanted to focus on parliamentary socialism and capitalist society. And he wasn't much taken with IR. So it's maybe slightly ironic that tonight we are debating a very IR international history, international relations,

kind of question and the question we're looking at tonight is are we in, did we ever escape from something called the Cold War?

And are we now in the midst of something which some people like to call a second Cold War or a new Cold War? Some even say the Cold War never ended, if you want to be completely conspiratorial. It was always going on anyway. You knew what the Russians and the Chinese were always up to. They were always up to something deeply subversive, so it never went away. So all those liberal illusions were mainly just illusions. So to debate the question, I thought it would be great to get along with three of my very finest colleagues and friends here.

who I've known for many years at the school. On the right over here, nothing to do with politics by the way, Barry Bazan, who was educated at the LSE, been very much associated with the LSE and other places too of course. I always say this about Barry, he never gets embarrassed when I say it. He's one of the finest guys in international relations in the world and one of the best known. And so Barry, great to have you on here tonight. And Barry I think will be advancing the thesis

I think I've got this right, Barry, that there is indeed a new Cold War and that sometimes historians themselves get so hooked up on history, maybe I'm paraphrasing you, Barry, that they don't quite see what we mean by the term Cold War and why it is a new one. You're giving my... No, no, no. LAUGHTER

I'm sorry about that, Barry. You can leave now. And then Elizabeth Engelson, go away. Elizabeth Engelson from the International History Department, a specialist on China, has written a fantastic book on China and America and the political economy of the history of that relationship going right back to the 1970s, which I really enjoyed reading. So it's wonderful to have you. And Elizabeth, I think, were mainly focused, not surprisingly, on China.

and how we characterize the relationship, particularly between China and the United States. And last but by no means least, Vlad Zubok, an old friend of mine, a great specialist on Russia, wonderful book on Soviet collapse, many, many other things besides. So I'm not going to go into all their details, all their bios. You know all about them. You should know anyway. So Barry, I'm going to ask you to kick off

the discussion tonight on from liberal peace to a new Cold War. By the way, we will be taking some questions online. Could you also, by the way, turn off all your phones so there's no interruption. So I wonder if you could give an LSE welcome to Barry Bazan to kick off the proceedings. Thank you.

Thanks, Mick. Well, as you announced, I'm going to make the case that we are indeed in a second Cold War and therefore that there are new Cold Wars. And I'm going to do this somewhat at the expense of historians, which might get some interesting discussions going.

The debate about whether there's a new Cold War or not seems to divide into two lines. On one side, perhaps still the majority side, there are a lot of historians who basically say if it doesn't look like the first Cold War, it isn't a Cold War.

In other words, they they drink up all kinds of criteria. It's got to have an ideological divide. It's got to be two superpowers. It's got to be low economic interplay between the the principal antagonist, blah, blah, blah, and on and on and on. This I think is

a pretty useless way to approach the subject because it means essentially you're saying okay there was one cold war and it was historically unique and the chance of there ever being anything that comes very close to looking like that is next to zero so it means the term cold war is taken out of general theoretical use and as a theorist of course I don't like that

taking that term out. So I favor a definitional view. In other words, what do we mean when we say Cold War? It's a simple enough term, right? Cold War. So it tends to mean it's a type of war. It can't mean anything else. It's not a cold peace. It's not a mobilization. It's a cold war, but it is a type of war.

The cold bit means that there's no direct fighting between the principles, which doesn't disallow a lot of fighting around the edges. In the first Cold War, there was a lot of fighting around the edges. Think of Vietnam and Afghanistan and what have you.

A Cold War is not just any protracted rivalry, which is how Brands and Gaddis describe it. It has a set of conditions about it.

And the two principal conditions, other than that it shouldn't be a hot war, the two principal conditions are first, that there are political issues and differences seen as worth fighting for, and second, that everybody is scared to hell of actually having a hot war, usually because of the presence of weapons of mass destruction and the fear of escalation into use of those weapons.

So to my mind, those two conditions, things worth fighting for, but fear of actually engaging in a hot war, when those two things come together, you have a Cold War. And I think that's what we had in the first Cold War, and I think we've now got a second instance of it, which is not unrelated to the first Cold War, but is different from it in some ways.

So what are the things worth fighting for in this second Cold War? I think there are a number of things that might be thought about in this respect, but which aren't actually what's worth fighting for. The most obvious thing that isn't being thought about is who's going to dominate the world, right?

We're not in that kind of game. That was the game in the first Cold War. The game at the moment is that we've got a whole bunch of great powers, some old, some new, and none of them want to run the world. The problem is not somebody wanting to take over the world. It's an under-managed international society in the face of a number of collective crises. So...

We are not fighting about who wants to control the world. The Americans have pulled back from that. I actually believe the Chinese when they say they don't want to take over the world, but they want their own power.

I don't think this second Cold War is about ideology either. It's not even about autocracy and democracy. Indeed, as we sit here, the distinction between autocracy and democracy is beginning to narrow quite considerably. They are both surveillance societies,

which doesn't produce any difficulties for autocracies, but does for democracies. And with the rise of what I think of as a sort of species of neo-fascism within the democratic community, the difference is beginning to wane.

I think this would only become a really substantial cause or thing worth fighting about if people really dug their heels in about it. And there's not much sign of that going on at the moment.

Another thing that could be said to be worth fighting about, but which I think isn't, is the whole array of what I think of as post-colonial grievances. The global south is still very mobilized with the support of China and Russia against all of the colonial sins of the Western world, and the Western world doesn't really want to deal with that, so there are issues about...

status and influence in intergovernmental organizations, issues about restitution for past harms and insults and all of that. That's certainly worth squabbling about, but it's not worth fighting about. I don't think that's a kind of annex to the problems of this second Cold War.

It seems to me that the big issue defining what's worth fighting about in the Second Cold War is what might be called civilizational or spheres of influence boundaries, of which there are several.

The most obvious one is between Russia and Europe, in the Ukraine and in the Baltics. And this is not just about who owns what territory or which piece of what belongs to which civilization. It's also about status as a great power.

and status as a civilization, particularly so for Russia. If Russia loses the Ukraine war, its claim to being either a Eurasian civilization or a great power is considerably weakened. And Europe is in a somewhat similar position. If Europe loses Ukraine, its status as a possible great power then comes very much under a cloud.

There's a similar sort of civilizational spheres of influence issue between China and the United States along the fringes of Northeast Asia in particular. So Taiwan, the South China Sea, and all of that.

There's a boundary issue which could be looked at in the same way between China and India, and somewhat spheres of influence competition also in Southeast Asia. And you might want to put Israel and the Arab world into this box as well. These, it seems to me, are the main things that are thought of as worth fighting about and which define the issues in the Second Cold War.

If we look then at the kind of methods and characteristics of this war, a number of things stand out. I think one could go on for hours about this, but I think the interesting one, which seems to be growing almost by the day, is the resort to what I think of as infrastructure war.

This is partly about cyber war, but I think the two are separable. Cyber war is a kind of continuous face-to-face mode of confrontation, but the entry costs to cyber war are very low, so all kinds of players, including quite small ones, can get into that game.

Infrastructure war seems to be at the moment mainly about attacks on cables and pipelines and shipping. There are some hints that it might also move to attacks on aircraft.

So far not much in the way of attacks on railways, but that may be because most of the railways in Europe are so useless nobody would know if they were disrupted. There's also an element in this infrastructure war of attacks on social infrastructure, most obviously social media and the way in which elections are conducted.

So infrastructure war, cyber war, they are connected but separable. And they seem to be quite conspicuous features of this war.

There's also what I would call a half proxy war going on, the war in Ukraine. This is quite comparable to the war in Vietnam in some ways in that one of the principles is engaged in the actual fighting, but the other one is not. So a half proxy war is the most dangerous element in a Cold War. It's the one that's perhaps most likely to escalate into a hot war.

So what are the prospects for this? It seems to me that as a general proposition, one might bet that Cold Wars tend to be longer than hot wars. We have a sample of one to go by at this point, so I can't do any kind of fancy statistics on a sample of one. But hot wars are exhausting, right?

I mean, any of you who've read any kind of histories of the First and Second World War, you will understand immediately that these are not sustainable. These all-out total great power wars are not sustainable for a long time under modern conditions.

Three minutes? Okay. I'll give you four. So hot wars tend to exhaust the participants fairly quickly. Cold wars, you can drag on a cold war for a very long time.

The Cold Wars will always contain some risk of escalation to hot wars, but in general it's fairly low. I think the interesting question about the second Cold War here is partly about Ukraine, but in the longer run it's about these infrastructure wars. How far can you push those kinds of attacks?

without them being understood as a form of hot war. This is a boundary that we have yet to figure out. The way out of this war would obviously be

an agreement on boundaries and principles of peaceful coexistence amongst a rather diverse set of great powers and the making of a very pluralist, what I would call a deep pluralist international society. That's diplomatically there as the way out. At the moment nobody seems to be particularly interested in it, but

I think the issues at stake here are not as deep as they were in the first Cold War when it was about who was going to control the world. It's not about that. So with a bit of common sense and perhaps with a bit of pressure from the global environmental issue, which

looks like it's just going to go and get worse and worse and worse year by year, so we will be punished more and more and more as the climate warms up. And at some point that may bring people to their senses and say, actually we have a bigger collective problem here than the things we're squabbling about now. That's not going to happen tomorrow, it's not going to happen probably

within this decade, but it is a possible mechanism which might begin to bring the second Cold War that we're in to an end at some point probably in the 2030s. Thank you. Barrett, thank you very much indeed. I've got eight questions for you, but I won't ask them now.

Elizabeth, over to you to reflect on what Barry said and indeed reflect on. Yeah, thank you so much Mick. I'm going to go off piste for a moment and just sort of respond for a moment to some of the ideas you've thrown out Barry because it's very generative and fruitful. And the first thing I want to do as has been alluded to in the introductions, I'm a historian, I'm going to be doing

you know, all the annoying historian things like historicising the term Cold War. But I want to do so to make a very important point. And that is when we think about the word Cold War, the term Cold War, it was coined by George Orwell in 1945. And he wrote an essay

exploring the repercussions of what it means to have developed nuclear weaponry, what it means to have a new form of technology, and what that means for humankind and for warfare. And he did speak that this new kind of technology may change the structures of international society, international relations, how it is that war operates. It might end up being what Orwell described a cold war.

That label, that concept that Orwell described, then became popularized in the United States. Walter Lippmann in particular, a journalist, a very prominent journalist in mid-century United States, very much popularized this concept of the Cold War. So this notion of the Cold War was first and foremost an American-centric term. It was a term used and associated with American politics, particularly in the 1950s and 60s,

And in the specific case of the work that I look at in China, it was a term that was actually very rarely used by Chinese policymakers. The Cold War as a framework of analysis is a Eurocentric and specifically American-centric way of viewing the world. That was how it developed historically. One thing that I wanted to sort of add on to this, though, and it stems from your discussion, Barry,

is this second criteria that you have about how it is we can define a Cold War. So the first one is this sort of, that there is something worth fighting for, and the second one that you've given us is that there is also a simultaneous fear of the repercussions if you do fight for it.

And I do think there is an element, and Orwell wrote about this in his essay, there is an element of the ways in which human societies have operated that is different, a fear, an element of fear that has...

altered the way it operates as a consequence of the development of atomic weaponry. So I do think the development of atomic weaponry has led to a different kind of ways in which international relations since the mid-1940s has operated is an important thing to grapple with. I'm not a political theorist, so I'm not going to be providing theories about what it means to have a post-

a nuclear world, but I do think that element of post-nuclear is important. That is not to say, and now I'm going to go back to my notes, that is not to say that we are living now in a new Cold War or that the dynamics that unfolded in that sort of moment in the Cold War are applicable to today's context. I think this framework of having something worth fighting for and a fear of the consequences can be applied to any war.

What was specific about the Cold War was not only the context of post-nuclear technological development, but two factors. And there's two factors that we do not see. And I'm going to focus in particular on the sort of example that often gets used quite to my sort of chagrin

is in US-China relations, right? So we're constantly getting people saying, you know, we're in a new Cold War between the United States and China. China is sort of substituting for the historic Soviet Union. So that's sort of the sort of analogue that I'm going to be playing with. China, is it the new Soviet Union? Are we in a new Cold War dynamic, et cetera, et cetera? And my short answer is no.

The short answer is no because of two reasons. The first, and they're both structural, they're not political, they are structural. So the first has to do with the fact that the United States and China are economically interdependent. There have been efforts to friend shore, to offshore, to all of that. We've got the Trump tariffs, we'll wait and see what happens there.

As it stands, the United States and China and most of the global economy is extraordinarily economically intertwined. It is economically interdependent in a way the Soviet Union and the United States were not. So structurally, it is a very different situation than it was during the historic Cold War. And the second fact

is that the Cold War as a phenomenon was an ideological clash. It was a clash between visions of how it is world society should operate. And they were both totalising visions. The United States saw capitalism

capitalism as being the crucial global way of structuring international order. It was a totalising vision. So too did the Soviet Union, that communism was something that would happen globally. This was a revolution without borders, workers of the world unite, etc. So both visions were totalising and for that reason incompatible.

This ideological clash does not exist between the United States and China. In fact, the United States and China case, we see a very different dynamic in which China has converged with the global capitalist system. And that, in fact, was a product of the Cold War itself.

So the very creation of a globalisation and a world that we're familiar with today, the very creation of interdependence, was in and of itself a Cold War product. The United States, in its efforts to build a world safe for capitalism, bolstered the economies of Japan, of South Korea, of non-communist nations in Asia and across the world. What mattered to them was that they were not communists.

But the product of that was the globalization that we still live with today. And what happened in the case of US-China relations was that the Cold War dynamic that was extraordinarily frosty between the United States and China during the 1950s and 60s, it did begin to end. But it ended very differently to the way in which the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union ended. So Vlad...

My colleague has written about the collapse. Your book is called Collapse, right? The collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cold War ended in terms of US-Soviet relations with systemic collapse of one side. This sort of vision that I spoke of, the totalising vision, it collapsed in the Soviet Union. In the case of US-China relations, it was not collapse.

but convergence. China converged with the global capitalist system. And this is what I chart in my book. The global capitalist system merged itself with the dynamics happening in China, used the population for cheap labor, the workshop of the world, et cetera. And it's this very convergence that was a product of the Cold War and helps us understand why it is the dynamic between US-China relations today is not one of a Cold War.

I want to turn briefly now to some of the pitfalls of using the Cold War term because it's not just a sort of academic debate, this is not just sort of an issue of historians wanting to hold on to specificity and theorists wanting to do sort of much more sort of conceptual work. There is a politics behind claiming that we are living in a new Cold War and part of that

politics and part of that problem is that using a Cold War framework imposes a binary upon which policymakers are necessitated to operate. The Cold War was a rigid binary that did not allow for nuance or for change and what we're living through at the moment is a world that necessitates policy flexibility. It necessitates

an understanding of contingency and chance rather than rigid sort of binaries of good versus evil or what have you. Instead, I want to put forward an alternative way of thinking about China and thinking about how the United States might engage with China rather than this Cold War binary.

Because so much of the Cold War binary that gets used is tied to China's current economy. So depending on the particular political argument you want to make,

People will be pointing to China's economy either as growing and strengthening and look at its green energy production, etc. Look at what's happening in AI just in the last 24 hours. We're seeing this strength of China's economy and therefore China is a threat and we need to act in a certain way. Threat perception being tied to China's economy but also being tied to policy prescriptions as a consequence.

But on the other hand, you have just as many commentators talking about the perils of China's economy, its housing crisis, its electric vehicles oversupply, its high unemployment rates within its population, etc. And those arguments can be used also instrumentalised in different ways, depending on the political sort of aim at the time. And instead, what I think we need to be doing is...

centering both of these things, the strengths and the weaknesses of China's economy, its military and other aspects of its society, and centering that simultaneity as the point. China is a paradox, the China paradox. If we use this framework of paradox and center it as our analytical framework for thinking about China, and I'm saying we, really referring to you as policy makers here,

then this paradox allows for the simultaneity of multiple things at once and therefore allows for policy flexibility. It's a very different vision to the Cold War binary and the rigidity that comes with it.

The final thing I want to turn to is this question of why is it that the Cold War framework is even being rehabilitated and used in the first place? Why is it then, when speaking of US-China relations in recent decades, there's been this growing interest in using the Cold War binary? And I want to put forward two thoughts, and I'd be really interested to hear additional ones from the audience, because I think there are more.

But the first that I want to put forward for discussion is because historically, if we look at the historic Cold War, there is a perception that the United States won it. The United States won the Cold War. The Soviet Union collapsed.

And so turning to this Cold War framework for US policymakers to see China through this Cold War framework is a comforting thing. It's a sense in which there is a chance that perhaps we'll win again. We won the Cold War the first time around. We may do it a second time. Now, the second reason I want to sort of throw out there for discussion is that this framework is also one in which

political science and international relations itself began to be... ..expand in really particular ways. As a discipline, its history stems from the sort of late 19th century, early 20th century, and it was during the Cold War itself...

that political science as a discipline began to really expand and think through its different theoretical frameworks. And so I do think there is also an extent to which the history from which political science has grown influences the ways in which their practitioners today continue to turn to ideas and continue to turn to frameworks in trying to make sense of the world

today. There is so much more that I could say. I would like to put out there that I'd like to talk about TikTok. So if anyone wants to ask me a question about it in relation to these ideas, I'll do it. But for there, I'll stop for now. Are you buying TikTok? I don't buy nothing.

You've just met the new Elon Musk at the LSE. How much can I get? I see students in this room and they know that that's not true. Over to you on Russia. Well, actually...

Actually, Nick, I want to speak about Russia and the United States. That's fine. Elizabeth stole the line from you when she said that the whole metaphor of the Cold War was adopted and adjusted.

by the Americans for American purpose, for the purpose of building American empire. Because if we go back to Orwell, Orwell has three empires fighting. It's easy to guess which three empires-- the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union maybe. So ideally, you can have a Cold War inside the West, which I will get to in a moment.

And then a second observation, it's sometimes difficult for a historian to say, when you name something, like let's say this is fascism,

Is it really fascism or it becomes fascist because you name it fascism? I'm not going into that. But sometimes schemes, theoretical schemes and historical narratives acquire life of their own and they have self-fulfilling kind of prophecy quality to them. And turning to Russia, Russia never, the Soviet Union or Russia never used the expression the Cold War. I grew up as a Cold War historian. That turned out without using the term.

But then in the 90s, and that coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, I began to hear this term all over the place. And for me, that goes back to the narrative of Soviet collapse. Because for many who gave the West its victory in the Cold War, Gorbachev and his entourage, they believed that they ended the Cold War in 1988-89.

For them, the Cold War ended not with the Soviet collapse, definitely. They did the job for the West by defeating communism themselves, and they handed it on a silver plate to the West. And that was a moment of opportunity when the West could have said, good boys, continue like that. And this is what happened in the end, which caused, in the end, the Russians sensed that they were duped.

that they were not really included, that the Americans didn't show enough generosity to them. I'm not going into complex factors of whether it was true or not. It's a matter of perceptions. And Robert Jervis gave us a lot in terms of theory of perception and misperceptions, how much they influence international relations.

But that led to deep sense of national humiliation by many in the Russian elites that I discovered actually in his book, William Burns, who just stepped down from the role and a CIA director replaced him.

Someone else pointed to this in his book as probably inevitable development. That is Russian humiliation, Russian nationalism. But still, America could have shown more generosity as Churchill advised, be generous. You know, victors should be generous to the vanquished, right?

Second point about Russian reaction is, and that by the way, finishing the first point, this is when those who believed that Gorbachev betrayed the country and destroyed the Soviet Union began to use the term Cold War in a sense that you mentioned. I know Stephen Codd can use this expression, never-ending Cold War, but for the ex-Soviet hardliners and Russian hardliners, it became a never-ending Cold War. They destroyed the Soviet Union with the hand

using the proxies and using to traitors like Gorbachev and they continued to destroy Russia. So that's very important to stress. Then Russians, particularly in the elite level, looked at China and kept comparing. Gorbachev and his successor Yeltsin struggled and failed to get a major plan to stabilize Russian currency and ease the fate of Russians during the Great Reform, economic reform. At the same time,

Western investments into China started flooding and ultimately surpassed the Marshall Plan many times over. It was logical for many in the Kremlin to reach a conclusion: greed and narrow interests, not real inclusivity and liberal values, governed the West. It became actually and crucially Putin's own conclusion, I think, and later the majority of Russian elites concurred with him.

Too much is written and said about the expansion of NATO. I wouldn't go through it. But it's crucial to point that for Putin and many in the Russian elites, it was not NATO per se that was an enemy that they had to fight against. It was their non-inclusion into NATO that was very crucial. And many would dismiss it as just a minor point of status because Russians got their place in G7, you know,

But that was the moment when I think the bifurcation point happened. And Russians concluded, okay, you wanted to have a Cold War on us, you'll get your Cold War. You don't want to include us into your club or keep us on the margins of your club. We'll form our own club. Again, it was not the conclusion of everyone. It was a conclusion of the Russians.

of Putin and one man was enough as it turned out. The last point is that often overlooked what happened well before the Cold War began a common, a new Cold War became a common term.

As far as I can establish, the first significant writer who began to use it, the New Cold War, was Edward Lucas. 2008. The New Cold War, Putin's Russia, and a threat to the West. But in fact, before it, and mind you, it was before the annexation of Crimea, of course,

But even earlier, there was an interesting game in Central and Eastern Europe that can be called politics of memory and politics of history. To simplify it greatly, many elite people in Poland, Baltic states, and Ukraine began to say that Russia was and always would be an aggressive and imperialistic power.

The only way to deal with Russia was to contain it and make it as weak as possible. And of course this was one of those things when the narrative became a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also it was a perfect match for Russian, growing Russian nationalist discourse. Right? So now let's turn to the title for this panel, "From Liberal Peace to a New Cold War."

We have a, as if we passed from some kind of a paradise of liberal peace to something that we now call a new Cold War, using very old joke about the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, nor Roman, not an empire. I would say the liberal peace was something in the middle of that, right? So this order was replete with wars.

of course not in Europe, but one was, and very big was, one was in the Balkans, as we all remember, during the 90s, and ended with the bombing of Belgrade. So this was just...

just not a transition from a global order to disorder. That was something much more nuanced and worthy of different geopolitical and historical lenses that we normally do. The pivotal factor of so-called global liberal order, GLO, was not so much collective consensus or rules or international community, but the US power.

It was US power and a very specific nature of US internationalist ideology. Some students of mine are here, so we covered it in our seminar. We call it often the Wilsonian tradition, but one historian of the cold was John Fusick. We covered it in the seminar.

wrote that this Cold War liberal ideology by the United States consisted of Trinity, national greatness, global responsibility, and global anti-communism. Now, very quickly through history, what happened in 1991 when the Soviet Union was gone? Global anti-communism had no meaning.

China is not really communist, they decided. They began to invest a lot. The Silicon Valley discovered China and poured billions into China. Okay, then the United States stayed an indispensable power and it looked like the global responsibility of the US elites, the US sort of securitocracy remained intact.

But it didn't rest anymore on anti-communism. It rested on the crusade for global human rights and some other elements. But then, OK, that forbidden name comes up, Trump. He came up in 2016. And look at what happened. That's interesting. Without anti-communism, the US national ideology-- and I say national ideology, it was not transnational-- rested on two legs.

The sense of national greatness, sounds familiar, and global responsibility. What then Trump did? He removed global responsibility. So the United States suddenly teetered on one leg, called national greatness. And by the way, MAGA said again. Again. So back to Orwell.

We're into a new, an entirely new situation when I think it's not about democracy versus authoritarian countries at all. And here, by the way, and I agree with Barry Boussaint, he thinks the same. But in my view, it's an even more unique situation when we have the main enemy to the global liberal order coming from within.

from the very heart of the global liberal order from American politics. And, you know, if Trump passes in four years as a transient phenomenon,

I would say, hallelujah, I was so deeply wrong about it. But if it doesn't, if so many tens of millions of Americans continue to think that actually GLO didn't serve them well, it was a rotten deal for them, and they need to renegotiate, and for that they can go to some kind of hybrid war, not only against Denmark, but against the United Kingdom.

What about this scenario? It's totally hilarious, but Orwell thought about it back in 1945. So in my view, is the global liberal order irretrievably broken? That is the question we should ask. Not about the new Cold War. One thing is clear. This order cannot function without American leadership, military, financial, and informational resources of America.

given the current ideological polarization in the US that we see and it's extremely hard to restore not only American consensus but the West as well as such so in my view it's we can say that Wilsonianism is not dead yet but it is grievously grievously wounded by the new unilateralist ideology of American greatness so to conclude what

What kind of war, what kind of conflict we're in and where are frontiers of this conflict? Are there Huntingtonian frontiers between the civilizations like Europe or Russia? Are they really in Donbas, Ukraine and the Taiwan Straits? Or are they inside the US itself, inside US Congress, inside NATO and EU, the border of mid-Mexico in Greenland? Thanks Vlad, that was great.

Let me maybe make two points. I mean, one provocative. What's wrong with the Cold War? It's not hot. Good. Okay. So you lived through the 20th century. You went from 1914 to 1918. How many millions died? Empires collapsed. Russian revolutions created. You went through an even worse war between 19... Whichever way you want to date it, from 31 if you're Chinese, you know.

if you're British, but you went through a Second World War which led to 30, 40 million people dead, 27 million in Russia, 15 million in China. Trump says 60 million. Well, Trump gets his facts occasionally wrong. You know that. You know that. So I suppose, you know, in a kind of common sense kind of way that I tend to talk these days, you might say, well, Cold War's good because at least it's not hot.

And I always thought the point of the Cold War wasn't whether you characterise it as such, whether Lippmann did it or Orwell, and they did it, obviously both. It's simply to say, well, look, it's better than the alternative because at least it's being contained and constrained, and it's being constrained by nuclear weapons. I don't mean to... No, no, no, no, no. LAUGHTER

I've only got half an hour to speak. So anyway, come back to me on that one. But it kind of seems to me that, should we be so afraid of the notion of it being a Cold War when in fact it means it's not a hot war?

Having a Cold War which is at all sorts of level, infrastructure, Barry's saying, all sorts of other things, disturbing societies, disinformation. Yo, that could be a whole lot better than the real thing when bombs are dropping on London, when annihilation of whole races of people and collapse. Maybe we should welcome the notion of a Cold War. There I said it and it's on record now so I'm really finished forever. LAUGHTER

The second point I make, and again hopefully provocative, I didn't want to mention the word Trump because everybody, you can't pick up anything without Trump being stuck on it somewhere. Presumably one's got to be conscious of you being in something called a Cold War. Well, Trump may not be conscious of anything at all, who knows.

It seems to me, and I put this again rather crudely, it looks to me like he might want to do a deal with China. Elon Musk, after all, has some significant investments in China, and he's not the only major corporate who has major investments in China. And it looks to me too, Glad, correct me if I'm wrong, but you know I'm not wrong, by definition. LAUGHTER

It might be that he kind of wants to do a deal with Putin too. So if the leader of what we used to call the free world, Donald, is saying on the one hand I want to do a deal with Vlad, not you, Putin, and I want to do another deal with Mr. Ping, Xi Jinping, over there, then...

Where's the Cold War? He's a peacemaker. He's a peacemaker. He's a peacemaker. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that either, by the way. But no, he doesn't. I just raised those two questions. Barry, you want to come back, and you want to come back. I knew you want to come back. And you'll all come back. And if you want to say something about each other's contributions as well, that would also be very good. And then we'll open it up for debate from the floor. Barry. Thank you.

Peacemaker, as I recall, was a name given to a type of six-gun. Yeah, yeah. The American frontier. So you might want to think about that. Theodore Roosevelt got one of his things right. I'll just make a couple of points. I think in response to your idea about a deal...

I'd see that almost completely opposite. It seems to me that both in the first Trump term and in the one coming up, and indeed in the Biden term, America and China cultivate each other as rivals. They want a tense, hostile international environment because each of them is strongly committed to...

quite kind of severe domestic reforms, which is much easier for them to carry out if there's a sense of tension and threat to hold the country together while they do so. So it seems to me the chance of a deal, as it were, is zero because that would undo the domestic policies of both of them. And as everybody in international relations knows, domestic policy always trumps foreign policy. So...

I would say that. If I can respond to Elizabeth's points about the importance of economic interdependence and of totalizing visions, well, I just don't get that.

In my scheme of things, you know, First World War, Second World War, okay? First World War, Second World War, big in economic interdependence, made no difference, right? It breaks down when you have a hot war, but you can still have a war with economic interdependence or not. I know there's a lot of liberals who always had warm-hearted thoughts that world trade and investment and all of that

would cultivate peace. But the case for it really doesn't stand up very strongly. And ideological differences aren't necessary either. There weren't any ideological differences in the First World War, and everybody was quite happy to go out and massacre each other on the basis of no ideological differences. So I don't see how those factors play when you're thinking about war. It's basically...

is there something really worth fighting about or not? And then are you prepared to fight about it or not? Or is the prospect of fighting just too scary? And that's what gives us a Cold War. And in that sense, you're perfectly right that it all begins with nuclear weapons. And there are no Cold Wars before 1945.

Liz, you go. Yeah, I mean, I think this point about the nuclear weapons was one that I made that I think is important. But the point I was making about the interdependence is to do with thinking structurally about the current situation between the US and China rather than the situation between the United States and the Soviet Union. It's not about... I'm not making an argument that the interdependence is going to mitigate war or lead to peace. It's not a normative argument about...

about what it will do so much as a structural argument about why its existence is precisely why we are not living through a Cold War. There are quite a few things that have been provocatively thrown out there in your usual way. And there are a couple of thoughts that I want to also sort of pick up on. So this idea then of interdependence is my point here is structural.

I think I'll go straight and quickly to your first provocation, Mick, the one where I wanted to jump in straight away and say, no, but... And that is your provocation about, well, you know, what was so bad about the Cold War? It was peaceful, not that many people died. I mean, that is historically inaccurate.

The Cold War was profoundly violent. The Cold War's killing fields, right? This is a question about perspective and a question about, really, about racial hierarchy and about valuing all human beings equally. So the Cold War was...

was extraordinarily violent. It was extraordinarily fearful and dangerous for many, many people throughout the world. And so I reject this idea that it was peaceful and that if there's no bombs in London, then that's OK. So the Cold War was extraordinarily violent. End of story. And so therefore, not something to be desired.

The second thing is to do with this idea about Trump, right? And so will Trump make deals with China and what does that mean? I flagged for you all that I would like to talk about TikTok. I'm still not going to do it yet.

But I would like to talk about it. But Trump's deals with China, is he going to make a deal with China? Is it going to be over TikTok, other things, leveraging tariffs, et cetera? Sorry, I've been teaching all day, and so I'm losing my voice. But my point here is that maybe, right, maybe Trump is making deals with China. We don't know. We're living through it.

I don't think that is the important part of what is going on right now. What we haven't spoken about in this conversation is some alternative, we've had a few, but they're one of the core, I think, alternative ways of thinking about what's going on, particularly vis-a-vis US-China, and that is great power politics, right?

Vlad, you've raised this question about liberal internationalism and the liberal international order, the extent to which we might rehabilitate it. I want to talk about that more and reject that notion, but partly out of provocation, but also because I don't think that is going to help the current global crises that we live through. But the other sort of structural element of what's going on, regardless of what happens with Trump,

is a great power rivalry and great power politics happening between the United States and China. And so that is partly helping explain why it is certain policymakers within the United States did turn and have turned to the Cold War dynamic. It's to help sort of, again, I think, give this nostalgia for a framework in which the United States won that great power political dynamic.

But regardless of what happens with Trump, that larger, again, structural formation happening in international order is still occurring. And that still is occurring regardless of whether Trump makes a deal with Xi Jinping. Mr. Ping is one of the most wonderful things I've ever... wonderfully... I plagiarise it. It's Mr. Xi, just as a record, but OK. So, um... But, yeah, so regardless of what happens with Trump and the deals...

I'm going to leave it there, but there have been some really fantastic conversations. As I say, Vlad's point is really interesting. I could come back on your point about long peace. I didn't say it was a long peace. I think what I was trying to drive at was the nuclear weapons did create deterrence between the great powers, and the great powers did not go to war directly with one another. What happened in the Cold War has got it exported to what we call the Third World, where 25 million people died, were killed in a

appalling wars which were waged by both the United States and by the Soviet Union. So I didn't think it was a piece. I'm simply saying that it deterred the very existence of nuclear weapons did deter the great powers from going to war with one another with the consequences which would have led to more than 25 million deaths. That's the only point I was making. But anyway, we're all provoking one another which is absolutely outstanding. This is the LSE. Do you want to get involved in some more provocations? No, I think we've got enough. Yes!

We've had enough for one evening. Right, I've got some things coming in on this thing here, which is not moving, but I'll try. I've got one here, Barry says, I'm afraid I think Barry is wrong. My goodness me. Who is this guy? Oh, he's from Queen Mary University. It's okay. But basically, I think what's being said here, Barry, just to pick up on your point, which is a great point. Um...

It is about the current world, according to Lee Jones, is about maintaining global primacy and hence keeping challenging powers down. In other words, what the current world is about is American containment policy. I think that's what he's driving at there, if I understand it.

And therefore what the American grand strategy is, whether it was Biden or Trump, I suppose, although there's a debate there, is that they're still talking about containment. And that's certainly how the Chinese talk, if I understand it correctly, Elizabeth. They talk that the United States is engaged in containment, and that seems to indicate that this is, whether you want to call it a Cold War or not, is a Cold War, as containment was the fundamental driving strategy

of the United States. So that's one question for you there, Barry. Not that you're wrong. He says that, not me. If you could pick up on the point about containment. And you've got the inevitable question about the Thucydides. Yeah, okay. Thucydides trapped.

You know that one from the Peloponnesian War. We're stuck in the great Thucydides trap. Thucydides never used the term trap. I'm not even sure what the Greek word for trap is. But a man called Graham Allison, as you know, at Harvard, wrote a book on the subject and sold lots and lots of copies. He's a very good guy, I think, basically. But basically he thinks we're in a Thucydides trap. You know what he did...

16 power transitions over how many hundreds of years, 12 ended in wars and the likelihood of this one ending in war, not just cold, but ending in conflict remains very, very high. And by the way, he was speaking recently at the World Economic Forum where he said he thought that

that other things being equal, there's an 80% chance outcome. So if you want to say something about, not about New Cold War, but why this term Thucydides trap and how the Chinese respond to it. Because I think Xi Jinping, President Jinping, as I could call him, not Mr. Ping, basically it was quite clear that you've got to avoid this particular thing. And last point to you coming up, Vlad.

Well, I don't quite know what the point is because I can't quite read it, but I think it really adds up to this whole question of, I suppose, that you don't like the term Cold War. And I think one of the reasons you don't like the term, understandably so. I lived with it all my life. You lived with it all your life. I love to avoid you, I know. But doesn't it tell you something about the use of historical analogy and why such historical analogies can be very dangerous and misleading?

Beware historians bearing historical analogies. We love to argue through analogy. We like to reach back

The obvious point for us today to reach back to is less the First and the Second World War, but it's the Cold War because it's in the memory bank. It's still in our DNA and the consequences of it are still living with us today. So how about a little attack on historical analogy and analogical thinking? So Barry, how about containment for kick-off? This does prove, does it not, therefore we are, as you I think would say, are in the Cold War.

Well, whoever this questioner is, I return the compliment of thinking they're completely wrong. Maintaining primacy was, in a sense, what the first Cold War was about and then what American policy after the first Cold War was about. Now, I think America is having a very difficult transition.

And this is not a transition. I don't believe for an instant that the main transition is between China and the United States. It's between the old global industrial core that's been running the show, i.e. the West plus Japan, that's been running the show since the middle of the 19th century, and what's now called the global South, many of which are now industrializing and modernizing and gaining power. So the U.S.,

is in a very strange position. It doesn't really know what it wants to do. It's decided to be anti-China because that's good for its domestic politics. I mean, can you think of anything else that Americans now all agree on except that China is a big worry and a threat? There's hardly anything else, right? So it's become crucial to the unity of the American polity.

Under Trump's leadership and even to a substantial extent under Biden and Obama, there's no real abiding American interest in maintaining the kind of global responsibility it had before. The Americans want out. They've had enough of being the global hegemon. If Trump isn't about that, I don't know what he is about.

And at the same time, Trump is busily undermining the social foundations of America's global strength, about which he seems to understand nothing. So he thinks power is material power, whereas in fact, half at least of America's power over the last many decades has been the fact that other countries trusted it and accepted its leadership, despite all of its strange behavior.

The other thing is that the United States will not accept any alternative hegemon. So there's going to be no global leader. The Americans won't allow another global leader, and I don't think anybody wants that job anyway, as I said at the beginning of my piece. I think the problem is nobody's interested in taking responsibility for global alternatives.

and our major problem is not fights over who's going to dominate the globe, it's the fact that nobody's paying any attention to the management of the planet, which is in serious need of collective management in a whole variety of ways. So I think we're looking at a world order that is hailing

heading towards a kind of deep pluralism, multiple centers of power, each of them wanting to go their own way and be their own thing and have their own culture and civilization, and none of them wanting to take on the burdens of global leadership. I mean, look what it did to the United States. Who would want the job? Okay. Lucidity's trap and any other things you want to talk about? Yeah, I mean, I think the question about lucidity's trap

takes us away from this Cold War framework. It's again an alternative way of trying to make sense of the dynamic between the United States and China. So it's an example of a historian using case studies as Mick has explained to try and sort of

historical examples into a science with 80% probability or whatever we're hearing about the extent to which war might break out. And I think what we need to do is see this line of argument, see this framework, see Alison's work as part of a similar kind of dynamic in which even the very conversations that we're having today and that we're discussing are occurring. And it's an attempt...

by thoughtful people to try and make sense of the world and to try and avoid war. If we're going to boil things down, that is at the core of what's going on. The problem is that prior assumptions are not being, are not willingly

being sort of shifted on the part of certain political leaders. So there is still a desire to rehabilitate the liberal international order, even though that liberal international order was the cause of significant violence and destruction throughout, in particular, the global south during the Cold War, right? So for many, this liberal international order isn't something that needs rehabilitating or saving. And so I think these questions

of attempting to sort of have a peaceful world order are important. One of the problems is that political leaders in particular are refusing to fully engage with some of the sort of underlying problems

that are causing the issues. I think global climate crisis is precisely one of the core ones. But there are others as well. We're living through a crisis of capitalism. And we're also living through, I think, a very distinct way of thinking about politics and society. And it's here that I am going to raise my TikTok story, which I sort of...

One of the things that we're seeing with the TikTok saga, there's a lot I would like to say about it, but I'm going to say this one thing. And that is I'm really fascinated by the movement on the part of Gen Z and TikTok users, very overtly and very tongue-in-cheekly to Xiaohongxu, so Red Note, and in so doing to turning to a much more overtly Chinese app.

after being booted off TikTok and doing so with absolute tongue-in-cheek sort of humor and thanking their Chinese spy, right? So there's this whole culture of thanking their Chinese spy, saying goodbye Chinese spy on TikTok, thanks so much, I'm now going to go to Xiaohongshu or Red Note and give my data to the Chinese government there.

I think that is an extraordinarily important thing to grapple with. It is telling us something about the nihilism of a generation of people who, frankly, have been brought up in the post-Snowden, post-Wikileaks world, in which they're very familiar with governments spying on them across the world. The United States has all of their data. All countries have their data.

is a nihilism underpinning that that needs to be grappled with and taken very seriously because it actually again it gets to my point what I was going to say about it earlier was that it

proves why we're not in a cold war. Because even as we have TikTok being banned by Congress and political leaders, the political elite, certain within the United States, seeing TikTok as a question of national security, something to be worried about, you actually don't have that fear, that

fear of national security, of infiltration, operating at a social level amongst the users of TikTok. The population or the public opinion is actually very different to that of political elites. What you do see when we do look at the ways in which China gets operationalised in American politics

is you do see a much older and longer xenophobia, right? A fear of yellow peril, a fear of China taking our jobs. There is extraordinary racism underpinning the way China operates in American politics. But that national security fear, that fear of communism, that fear of, you know...

a Chinese government having our data really doesn't resonate with a generation of users. And I think that is, again, telling us something not only about why it is we're not in the new Cold War, but why this political culture is quite distinct at a generational level. OK, thanks. Do you want me to?

to speak on a now I think at this stage why don't I bring in some of the audience I've got a lot of questions coming in here but I don't want to privilege just the people coming in online so let's get some questions about 12 hands have gone up chap at the front okay I think chap here okay one can I take a second person somewhere

There's a woman up here. Take the thing off to the lady on the corridor. Can you see? Follow my digit. We'll take it up there. So we'll start with take two together. Try and make them questions rather than parliamentary blah-blahs. One here and then one there. Please, yeah.

Sure. Who are you? I'm Leon. I just graduated from LSE last year. Very good. And I do now. Okay. One thing that both Barry and Elizabeth did when they started talking was they set out... It's online. LSE technology at its very best. We're going to win the Cold War, you know that.

Next time. No, we just changed the name. That's right. Yeah. Go for it, Leon. So, the first thing you both did is that you set out criteria for what you thought Cold War was. One thing that neither of you mentioned but kind of alluded to throughout was bipolarity and I wondered whether you thought bipolarity was a good criteria for the Cold War or a Cold War as a concept. As far as I can tell, if you have a war, it's useful to know what the actors are, who the actors, is it China, is it Russia, are they both on a part of the same block? Yeah.

Yeah, it's bipolarity important. Okay. Leon, if I could just pick up on that before bringing in the second question. One of the questions that came online there, Barry, was the Cold War was defined as a bipolar system. We're now living in what we might call more broadly a multipolar order. Can you have a Cold War...

in conditions of multipolarity to kind of put it both empirically and theoretically. Barry, maybe that's more a question for you anyway, just to build on yours, Leon. So clearly you're reading each other's minds in a group. And then the lady here, yeah, person here, yeah.

Thank you. Hi, nice to meet you. I'm from Pakistan. I'm a journalist and studying in masters over here. So basically, I wanted to ask in a world where climate crisis is very real-- and thank you so much, Elizabeth, for pointing that out-- and of course, the idea of neoliberalism and also the health crisis that we saw in 2019.

Do you think, and of course in the rise of the digital platforms, do you think the concept of security has to be reframed in a way to take it away from a masculinist protectionist ideology and more towards a health-oriented or more towards a human security-oriented approach? And of course, you talked about the...

American leadership being the global leadership, do we really need that? And of course, eliminate the indigenous ideologies of security? Okay, great. Varya, I think that's a question for you. I think you wrote a little book sometime about new security orders, didn't you, a long, long time ago? Yeah, back in the 90s. Thanks for that. Redefining what we actually mean by security and away from more traditional ways of talking about it.

Why don't you come in first if you want to come in on any of that. Pick up on the other things. On the questions or what you ask me about. Whatever you want to talk about. It's dangerous. Dangerous, I know. Whoever controls narratives control the world. So let me just tell again the analogies they come from me.

history but of course as Marx told us many many times, Marx, you know, the past is not just the past, right? People don't act as they wish. So analogies come up of course as crutches but also as a result of what I mentioned as politics of history and politics of memories and it's remarkably if we look back

to the period since 1991, since the disappearance of the Soviet Union, how selectively historical analogies are invoked and applied. For instance, for some reason, China was treated very charitably and nicely based on this illusory premise that it would go the way of Japan and Germany after World War II, you know.

because I suspect there was some element of greed involved in investing into that country. In terms of Russia, how struck how in the early 90s American diplomats, among them Burns, who was mentioned, Thomas Pickering, many others, mentioned another analogy, Weimar Russia. Weimar. Weimar Russia. Weimar.

It didn't get any cut in Washington, DC. So they're, no, no, no, no, no. We're doing fine for them. We're doing enough for them. Weimer, no, there was another era. So that analogy was not applied, right? For some reason, again, right? So another kind of interesting thing that comes to my mind is that widely spread

Crazy idea actually, probably among the Reaganites mostly in the United States that they somehow applied economic pressure on Gorbachev and Gorbachev sold the shop and the Soviet Union collapsed. So you could see the echoes of the same analogy when Putin invaded Ukraine. Oh, we just crushed the guy. We apply all these economic sanctions and lo and behold,

I'm not a rocket scientist, but I knew that Russia would not collapse somehow. I felt it. And lo and behold, it didn't collapse. And how many patented economists in Washington, D.C., and pundits in Washington, D.C., and maybe in London as well,

said, amazing, we never expected that. Did they operate on the basis of historical analogy? That's the same kind of trick. No, we once vanquished the empire of evil. There's another empire of evil. Same capital, Moscow. Oh, the Kremlin is the same. So we'll cross them again. So wrong analogies can go to very, very persistent pursuit of insufficient progress.

policies, policies that do not really solve the problem. Another use of analogy that, of course, is constantly used and abused, or maybe even misused, is appeasement. The Munich analogy is broadly used by all kinds of people. It was used during the Cold War. Of course, don't talk to those commies.

don't talk to Stalin and to a certain extent contributed to the emergence of Cold War liberalism as consensus. At the end of the '40s, Henry Wallace tried to talk to Stalin, appeaser, go back into your den. You never talk to the aggressor. So the same was applied to Putin at some point.

again, with the same kind of result. We got the war. And the same people say, oh, of course we were right because we would have gotten the war anyway. So analogies are interesting things that need special history maybe. I agree in some. Barry, do you want to come up to the point about...

Cold War equals bipolarity. Bipolarity equals Cold War. The modern world order is multi-parenting. Sorry, I don't smoke, by the way. Maybe I should. Basically, I

I've written a lot of rubbish in polarity theory, so I'm quite happy to rubbish in here. You've only got two hours, Barry. Okay, well, I'll try and be quick. If you want the long version, there's a very good book called Regions and Powers from 2003. You can have the entire argument there laid out in several hundred pages. But basically, I mean, even during the first Cold War, if I may use that term in this company, the...

There was one clear superpower, the United States, and then there was a kind of just about superpower if you only counted nuclear weapons and military strength, which was Russia. And then there was a bunch of great powers, Japan, the European Union, for example, and not to mention China.

And there were ridiculous debates then about whether it was actually a two and a half pole system because China was rising. Ridiculous. It was a system in which there were two superpowers and three great powers, or several great powers. My argument now would be

for the second Cold War is that we are rapidly moving towards a position where there will be no superpowers. I don't think there will ever be a superpower again because it was a fluke of the first round of industrialization that first Britain and then the United States could actually get up to 40% of the global GDP. Nobody's ever going to do that again because industrialization and modernization is spreading everywhere. China is rising, but so is a lot of others, India, etc., etc. So,

superpowers are a thing of history, I think. We are in a system of great powers and regional powers, and there will be several great powers. So the whole idea of polarity is a ridiculous simplification, and I would put it down to the fact, particularly bipolarity,

that it was just very flattering to the United States and the Soviet Union to differentiate themselves from everybody else in that way. And you will notice that polarity theory is an American theory. I don't know whether the Russians ever went along with it. Vlad, you can perhaps speak to that.

On the security question... Very briefly, Mark. I'm a constructivist all the way down on security, so there's another very good book from 1998 called Security, which makes the case that security is whatever people in authority of some sort can persuade a big enough and relevant enough audience is a threat, that nothing is a threat in and of itself. It's a question of what you can securitise.

So in the world we live in, some things are relatively easy to securitize. Terrorism, ridiculously easy to securitize, even though it hardly kills anybody. But can you securitize global warming? Not really. Can you securitize the threat from space rocks? Well, no, nobody's losing any sleep over that. And why is that? I mean, if you do the numbers, you can work out what the threat levels are.

So there's no such thing as an objective threat. Security is always defined by some people for some purpose and it depends on their being able to persuade the right audience to agree with that. And as long as they can maintain that position, then that's what security is in the terms of what defines behavior. Not an objective thing. It's socially constructed.

Okay, I'm going to take another round of questions. That'll be pretty quick. We'll take a gentleman down the front here, and then I want to come over here somewhere. Where's the other mic? Where is it? The one that's... Bring it down to the person here. Yeah, this person here, yeah. Sorry, I've got a left bias here. I do apologize. I can't help it. It's genetic. It's genetic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pass it over here. So the person down here and then you follow. Thank you for the discussion. My name is Hari. I'm a student from SOAS. You're from SOAS? Welcome. Thank you. So during the Cold War, it was the US view was with us or against us. Now with Trump coming back, the strategy of coercion by tariffs, it seems like it is with us or against us. What is the US view of a multipolar world? Do they believe in a multipolar world?

Do they believe in what? Multi-polar world. Okay, all right. I don't think so, but anyway. I think the answer to that is quickly no. But anyway, I'll leave the panellists to talk about it. We can take a vote. You can take a vote on that. No, we don't need to. Yeah, please. Yeah, hi. Hi. I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.

My question, sorry, my name is Simran. I'm a current LSA student, also a sanctions advisor. Yeah, speak up. So my question is actually building on the first question there. So for many in the global south, the Cold War was not a cold war, it was a hot war. And many in the global south also rejected the terminology of Cold War because it was a binary logic. So to what extent is this debate about those in the West who view this as a zero-sum game or binary logic versus...

those in the global south who potentially as my colleague said believe in the concept of deep pluralism yeah yeah okay well well i think that's a great question why don't we we're going to end on that one i think and it connects also to the first group you haven't spoken for a little while i want to bring you in here yeah no i'm about the global bringing the global south and also maybe pick up the point about

Can global warming be the thing that then in the end unifies us all around a very, I think you'd think no. I mean, I've heard this argument so many times. We're all fundamentally together in the world.

threatened by one fundamental existential danger, the death of the planet. And that in the end will mean that all of these kind of minor differences about whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever, will have to be subordinated to that. Barry, I think you think not, but anyway, maybe you can pick up on that one. Yeah, I can pick up on that.

So these questions about multipolarity, about the role of the global south in not wanting to choose, right? And I'm going to be speaking on the assumption that we're speaking about choosing between the United States and China. So these questions are also getting to, I think, a question asked earlier about security and a human-centric security, which I will get to also when I speak about climate change.

But what they're getting at is this idea of how it is that nations across the world respond to and are able to assert their own self-determination and autonomy in the context in which there is, particularly on one side, on the United States' side, a desire to

to frame things in a binary term, to frame things in terms of us or them. And there is a real movement happening in Asia, in Latin America, in Africa at the moment, in which, and we're seeing in the BRICS nations and elsewhere, in which there is a real movement to say this is a false binary, it's a false choice. And there is a real space, I think, for nations to

such as my home country, Australia, but also the UK, to actually listen to and learn from the ways that the global south is navigating these tensions between the United States and China at the moment, because it isn't a binary choice. It wasn't during the Cold War in some instances too, with limitations to that. But I think that that is a really important dynamic. What I think is even more important, and it does get to this question,

of climate change is that this question coming out the front here about bipolarity, I think it's very important, right? But I have no interest in rehabilitating the Cold War framework. It's not important to me politically or intellectually. It's not important to me to do it. What is important to me is thinking through how it is great power transitions occur. And if we look at great power transitions,

you know, from England to the United States or whatever it might be, much longer periods of time too, as Graham Allison has done, in fact, in his book, et cetera. And, you know, Paul Kennedy and others, many, many scholars have looked at great power transitions historically. What I think we may be living through, and this is... I'm going to do the thing that historians don't like, and that is, like, do some kind of semi-prediction. But my...

My feeling is that we, I mean, and with so many awarenesses of contingencies, of course, we may be, we are living in some kind of transition period. I do think that that is, that transition period is very palpable to most people and most people politically. And part of it is to do with the climate crisis. We are in a great power transition, perhaps.

And part of the climate crisis will be connected to that. China is miles ahead of the United States in green energy production and in the ways in which green energy fuels its GDP growth. So its growth in 2023 and 2024 was predominantly more than 50% fuel, GDP, fueled by the production of green energy. That is remarkable. That is very, very, very structural.

and long term. So we are looking, perhaps,

I don't believe in climate nihilism, that we're all doomed. I think we will find ways to adapt. Human beings have always found ways to adapt. I hope it isn't, but it's likely and it's looking like it will be painful. But we will find ways to live with the climate crisis that we've created. I think that's going to be connected to the great power transition that may occur in China's favour. May.

Do you want to come back on anything? I'll say a little bit more on the multipolar world. I think...

I still don't think it's a good way of thinking about the world we're in. We're in a world with several great powers and a lot of regional powers. But that's not how multipolarity is defined. And also there's a very strong implication in traditional multipolar theory that the basic game is that somebody's trying to take over the world.

Now, that's not the game in this, as I've argued. Nobody wants to take over the world. That's a very new situation, and we don't have the right name for it. So if I were you, I would junk polarity theory altogether as being much more misleading than helpful. On the climate thing, I would say, I mean, my...

My version of optimism is actually quite close to yours, which is to say the best we can hope for is that the climate crisis gets steadily, and I underline that word, steadily worse

So every year we are battered by stronger storms and more rain and floods and rising sea levels, but steadily and slowly because if there's a tipping point, basically we've had it. We will not have time to adjust to a major tipping point where something changes extremely quickly and the whole climate moves from one condition to another.

But if we get battered worse and worse and worse every year, that might just change minds at some point. I don't know when. I mean, it's a game you can play. Look at the world's disasters. Nobody cares, or the locals care, but nobody cares globally if hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of people die in Bangladesh from flooding. It doesn't register. Nobody cared about New Orleans there.

What's the titanic moment? When does something big enough happen that people actually wake up and say, bloody hell, we need to start doing something about this? If you take the titanic analogy that there has to be a big disaster before there's a change, then part of what it means is a lot of rich people have to die in whatever this catastrophe is. Wow. Right. Any final points? Mel?

Well, final points are, I heard two versions of the future here. First, America gives a baton of leadership to China. That's to a certain extent from Lizzie. Peacefully. Peaceful transition. Peaceful transition. The third, according to Alison, right? We have two only out of 16, but that will be the third.

And the second version is that we'll have no fight for who runs the world because it's meaningless. Well, it had been meaningless in the past, I should admit. Even Stalin, with all his evil, was incapable of running the world and never wanted to do it, despite Marxist-Leninist theory. But nevertheless, Americans repeated and were believed for decades that the Soviets, the Russians,

about to run the world. They want to conquer the world. So we have the use of narratives, again, beating common sense quite easily. And in terms of climate, I wish I were optimistic on this. The Titanic analogy tells me something else. Rich or poor, they will fight for the seat in the same boat.

And that's how it will happen. And first class goes first. Exactly. Yeah, okay, fine. All right, that's great. I just want to make one or two thanks to people, a few thanks. First to the Miliband programme, particularly to Milena over here, who's done much of the work to bring this. And also to the people in red who wander up and down. APPLAUSE Thank you. APPLAUSE

I don't know what your formal title is, but I'll call you the people in red, because this is the Ralph Miliband programme after all, and you're wearing the right colour. I'd also like to thank the LSE more generally, because I think the school does a fantastic job of public events.

I think it's an absolute duty of public universities, which are under such pressure at the moment, maybe not ours, but many, to do the job of informing, debating and discussing in an open way. We've got to do more of it. And I have to say, I've been at the school now for over 20 years and it has got better every year. So I think it's a great opportunity.

acclaimed to the school and to the events people and all people in events. I don't just mean this rhetorically, for the great job they do in the public events here and the school and many others in London, but I'll talk about the LSE here, doing a very, very great job. I'd like to thank all of our three speakers for being right, wrong and perhaps possibly deeply pessimistic.

I haven't heard one optimistic sign here. Last but by no means least, I'd like to thank you all for coming along tonight, asking great questions. I hope you've enjoyed the event. It will go up online. One final announcement. In the Ralph Miliband programme on the 18th of February, because the issue did come out tonight, we are having another public event through the Ralph Miliband programme called Climate Capitalism. Bang on! Can market-based solutions save the planet?

We know the answer is no, but we'll ask the question anyway, if only to knock it down. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.