The future of US-China relations
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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. Good afternoon. Welcome to the LSE Festival. It's great to have all of you here with us. My name is Peter Trubowitz. I'm a professor of international relations and the director of the Fallon United States Center here at LSE that has organized events

tonight's roundtable discussion on the future of US-China relations. So before I moved to LSE back in 2013, I taught at UT Austin, where every summer I would take a group of about 25 UT students to Tsinghua University in Beijing for a crash course on US-China relations.

And those days today are wistfully referred to in Beijing as the golden years or the golden age in bilateral relations between the two countries for good reason because back then the prevailing view in both nations was

was that as their commitment to open markets and institutionalized cooperation deepened, the bonds between them would grow stronger. Now, to be sure, there was no serious analyst on either side, I think, that thought Sino-American relations would be free of competition and friction. I mean, there was Taiwan's ambiguous status. That remained an issue. There were disputes over currency,

international copyright, technology transfer, that periodically disrupted what I think was kind of an era of more or less good feelings. For the most part, Chinese scholars and analysts, and I think their counterparts on the U.S. side, pretty much thought, they were cautiously, I would say, optimistic about the trajectory of U.S.-China relations, and so were their country's leaders.

So today, I mean, very little of that optimism is left. Mistrust is prevalent in Beijing and in Washington.

hardliners are in ascendancy and talk of course of a new Cold War is rife and so navigating this bilateral relationship has become one of the central issues of our time and so much depends on how relations between these two great countries play out in the coming months and years from stability in East Asia to who builds, governs and controls the digital world

to progress on climate change. So it seemed fitting and pretty prudent, given the theme of this year's LSE Festival, to organize a panel for the festival on the future of U.S.-China relations. And in doing so, I wanted to bring together a wide range of expertise to the table to have scholars and experts from different fields and lines of work to help

us grapple with the issues. And so I think we've got a terrific panel for you this evening. So starting from my immediate left,

is Rana Mehta, who is the S.T. Lee Chair of U.S.-Asia Relations at Harvard's Kennedy School. He's a leading historian on China, and Rana also teaches, writes, and comments extensively on contemporary China and how its rise to great powerdom is changing the world.

Next to Rana is Natalie Tocci, who is the director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome. She is the author of multiple books on European foreign policy. She was the special advisor to the EU high representative, where she wrote the EU's European Global Strategy, which is pretty good, but actually, I think even more important, she's an LSE alumnus.

Rounding things out is John Eikenberry, the Albert Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton. John is one of the best-known IR scholars in the world. He has published many books on world affairs, including his most recent one, A World Safe for Democracy. So it is terrific having all of you here.

Before we get started, maybe just a few words about the game plan for tonight. So I asked all three of them to take roughly eight to ten minutes each to give us their take on the direction of travel in U.S.-China relations. And I've also given them a very wide berth, as opposed to giving them one or two questions to speak to,

I asked them to just give us their take from their vantage point on kind of where they think U.S.-China relations are headed, why it matters, maybe who it matters to, and what might be done to prevent things from going off the rail completely.

So what we'll do is I might, once they finish, depending on where we are on time, put a question or two to them, but then we will open it up. For those of you in the room, just put your hands up, and then I will call you out or identify you, and the ushers will come to you. For those of you online...

Just put your questions in the Q&A chat. Please be sure when you ask a question to give your name, your affiliation. For those of you online, maybe where you're located in the world since we tend to get people coming in from all over the place.

And lastly, I assume everybody's got their phone turned to silent, but if you don't, please do that. So, great. Rana, let's start with you. So, your work brings you in touch with Beijing, Washington, kind of the thinking in both capitals. It'd be really great if you could give us kind of a lay of the land of Beijing.

thinking on both sides and, you know, kind of the majority opinion, but maybe just as importantly, what the minority view is. Thanks very much, Peter. And I'm just checking before I go any further that folks at the back, you can hear what I'm saying. The microphone is fenced up. Okay, fine. Any problems, you know, throw some peanuts or something and we'll turn up the volume.

So, Peter, first of all, thank you so much for the invitation to be here on this fantastic panel. And also thank you to all of you for being here on a beautiful sunny evening. Instead of being sensible and being over in the pub drinking a cold beer, you're here listening to us talking about US-China. So I'm very grateful for that particular indulgence on your part.

And I think that one of the things that we should remember is that although we are going to talk tonight, I hope, about some big issues of strategy, planning for the future and how the US and China are thinking of the next 5, 10, 20 years. Nonetheless, I think it's always important to remember that...

We're always dealing with people in these cases. It's actually the people who are underpinning these particular sets of policies who quite often make the difference. I'm not one of those people who believes that personality or individuals are the only things that matter in history. Lots of other things matter a great deal. But I also think it would be unwise to suggest that personality and individual choices have no significance whatsoever.

I think that's particularly true of China and the United States at the moment when it comes to China policy.

So let me use the short time that I have at the beginning to lay out, as Peter has suggested, some of what I think is going on in the two capital cities that matter centrally to this relationship, but also matter to the rest of us, what happens in Washington and Beijing and between them will affect London, China.

European capitals everywhere you can think of the world, South America, Asia, and therefore it matters well beyond what people in Washington and Beijing alone actually say and think. So let's start on the American side, which is where I've been spending time more recently.

And I would say that, broadly speaking, we can see the emergence at the moment of perhaps three groups who are not clearly defined, they're not even self-defined, but I think they are distinctive in terms of the way in which they think the U.S.-China relationship should develop over time.

The first group is perhaps one of the most visible at the moment. I would say that, you know, bearing in mind, Peter would like to think about not just who's there, but how proportionately important or less important they might be. I'd say that this group is probably one of the ones that's in the ascendant at the moment. That is the people who you might regard as being

I use the word in big quote marks, China hawks. In other words, people who feel that the greatest, the existential challenge to the United States is the rise of China in the world and U.S. policy should be oriented towards pushing back China.

against that rise. People who it seems to me, broadly speaking, fit in that category might include Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. You'll have seen if you followed his recent visits both to Manila and Tokyo and also to the Shangri-La dialogue at Singapore.

that he spoke in terms that frankly would not have been very different from those that Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State in the previous Trump administration, would have put forward, or actually probably the more hawkish figures that we've seen over the last 50 years of different types of international relations. Maybe a Spignier-Brasinski might have, in a different way, said similar things. I think that also reproduces, to some extent, the point of view of...

The man who's rapidly becoming one of the most powerful actors in foreign policy, Simultaneous Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio. I think nobody's done that double since Henry Kissinger, have they, Peter? So, you know, it's half a century since we've seen that. And he, I would say, is also someone who takes that kind of more traditional view in terms of pushing back.

I would say that that's very dominant in terms of what we see in that world at the moment. There are other figures like Deputy Secretary of the Pentagon, Elbridge Colby, I think, who would broadly be in that category. But there are others. And while their voices are less immediately audible, I think they're worth paying attention to. So the second category...

broadly people who are in business, but in a previous era, perhaps 20, 30 years ago, I would have said the most important voices, or the most audible voices, would have perhaps been what you might call the more traditional business interests, automobiles, fast-moving consumer goods, toothpaste, whatever. Now I think it's clearly tech where this particular group of people are concerned.

And the ambiguities that there are around people like Elon Musk being the obvious one, obviously his position in the administration has changed rather rapidly recently, but there are other people in that Silicon Valley world who simultaneously are clearly very well connected to a Trump administration which actually is pushing all sorts of boundaries of tech and how it hits the real economy in some very unusual ways. I'm thinking crypto and all sorts of other things that we just haven't seen before. Those folks, I think, are

are not people who are looking to cut China out of their world. They have different relations with China. Again, broadly speaking, and again, I'm just going from public statements, I don't know any of these people. I have a sense that Peter Thiel, for instance, is maybe more sceptical about China than Elon Musk was. But having said that, I don't think there is at the moment a tech conversation that can happen right now in the world

cuts China out and thinking about the future, the question of how far decoupling is genuinely possible in a world where we're going from fencing off particular types of technology to actually saying that it's not particular tech apps or even platforms, but the wider ecology that matters more. That's where science and where it builds up is going to be important. And finally...

and briefly on the American front, an even perhaps quieter group of people, but one that I think may become more and more prominent. I would love to know what Vice President J.D. Vance really thinks about China, because although he hasn't said that much, and what he's said has been pretty much along the lines of the rest of the administration, there are more and more indications that should he become, say, the next president, which is perfectly plausible,

he would be even more cautious about America having too big a footprint in terms of its international role. And that might or might not lead to a different direction of travel in terms of what kind of relationship the U.S. would have with China. He's not friendly to China in any way that I can see, but he is someone who thinks that the U.S. needs to think carefully about its resources, both financial and you might say emotional resources,

Vice President Vance, I think, really wants the U.S. to concentrate on America and what's happening at home. And that's a different message from most presidents or vice presidents that we've seen in the last half century. Let me take two minutes or so to just flip the mirror the other way around and talk a bit about Beijing.

Because all of these trends that I've been talking about and all these different factions that we've seen in America are also seen in Beijing. And by the way, they've noticed the one thing that I've left out and I will continue to leave out, which is on top of all that, what does President Donald J. Trump actually think about China? I think the answer is you don't yet know. So I'm not going to say more about it now, but let's use some time in the discussion to go further on that.

Stay with Beijing for a moment. I think that at the top levels, Xi Jinping and the Politburo Standing Committee, at some level, the view that's happening six months into the Trump administration is not that different from what it would have been six months before. By which I mean when I talk to people in Beijing and they give their views...

They say that actually quite often any US administration is going to be in the business of pushing back against China's rise. They say that Trump one did it. Biden did it. Trump two does it. Well, you know, that's just par for the course. And while there have been ups and downs in terms of the policy on tariffs, for instance, obviously over the last few weeks and months, nonetheless, I think the wider sense that China has is that it needs to

lean in to the wider geopolitical and geoeconomic set of decisions it's taken. And I would say there's a majority consensus view that opening up new markets, both trying to get closer to Europe, Natalie's going to talk about that, also finding the capacity to embed path dependency on China in tech, green energy and so forth in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia. That's a widely held set of views.

But I think that at least to finish this point, this sort of starting comment, I think there is at least one division that we can see that is important.

I think there is a grouping of people who really feel that actually there is very little conversation realistically to have with the United States at the moment, that you have to manage the relationship, but that it's going to be hostile and there's not much further to go. I think that probably Xi Jinping sits in that category. I don't think he has too many hopes, I'm guessing, of really reopening a wider relationship with the United States.

In terms of the next generation of leadership, bearing in mind Xi Jinping grew up in the Cultural Revolution and started from a position of some suspicion from teenage years of the outside world, to the ones who are coming in the next generation who are the first ones to see reform and opening in the 70s and 80s. And even though they've been disillusioned in many ways by what they've seen, they still have that as part of their mental map.

Those folks, I think, are more open to the idea that there may be more productive conversations to have in the near future with a United States that maybe is also thinking about its own position in the world, perhaps in more restrained terms. We don't know yet what to make of Chen Jin-ying, rising star in the...

of the party, someone who obviously came up very much through the system, but is seen to have his own social media presence, party chief of Shanghai being tipped for a higher position. So looking at some of those folks might mean that the current appearance of a rather monolithic anti-American view in China may begin to show some cracks in the glass in just a short period of time.

- Rana, that's a terrific rundown. We're definitely gonna wanna come back and talk about Trump. I'm also struck by this idea that there is potentially a generational difference between those who came of age, basically, like Xi Jinping during the Cultural Revolution and those who came of age during the Golden Age, the golden years.

Natalie, I was in Beijing. My wife and I were in Beijing in April. We were there at Tsinghua University to give some lectures. And we landed like a day after Donald Trump imposed 145% tariffs on China.

So what I was expecting is, you know, I gave a bunch of talks and met with a lot of people that the conversation would be principally about the U.S. And there was talk about the U.S., but what really struck me about it was how much the talk was about Europe and the possibilities of some kind of arrangement between China and Europe, the possibility of an opening, maybe splitting Europe off from the United States.

So you wrote the global strategy for the EU. I mean, when you look at that, you know, the idea of China, let's say, driving a wedge between the United States and the EU, I mean, what are the prospects? Is that real? Is that just a fantasy? What's your thoughts? Well, thank you, Peter, and really wonderful to be back in my alma mater. Very, very grateful. So...

Essentially, Europe has been on a journey when it comes to China. And that journey has really been conditioned by the triangulation with the United States, which basically means that given everything that Brian has just said, whereas the trajectory of that journey was relatively clear, I'm going to jump back to this in a moment, at the moment, Europe is lost.

which basically means that the Chinese don't have an answer to the question. But let me take a step back to sort of run you through the journey. You know, this once upon a time was a situation in which the European approach to China was really one that could be characterized by a mix of naivety and cynicism.

Cynicism when Europeans looked at China in security terms because basically they saw what China was doing in Asia and its increasingly assertive approach to the region. But basically deep down they kind of thought we don't really have a dog in this fight.

And then there was naivete when looking at what China was doing in economic terms, turning westwards, right? And really, for quite a long time, initiatives like the Belt and Road were viewed as being essentially teddy bearish and cuddly, right? Now, this, I think, was really the situation up until roundabout the global strategy time, right? So 2015, 2016, 2017. Right.

Then, as the US-China rivalry started growing, the journey moved into a second phase. And I would say that that second phase was again very much conditioned by the United States, as I said, as that rivalry grew. But I think it was both conditioned by the US and also obviously was independent of it and conditioned by China itself.

So there were elements that were unrelated to the United States. I mean, the fact that objectively it became increasingly clear or harder to deny that the Belt and Road was not very teddy bearish at all and it had a rather sort of sharp strategic edge to it.

And so, you know, Europeans gradually started, you know, in Italian you say, taking their ham off their eyes, their prosciutto off their eyes, right? And so it became increasingly clear, basically, what China was doing also, looking westwards. And then obviously, especially after 2022, right,

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the growing strategic alignment between Russia and China, given that obviously Ukraine is at the heart of Europe's existential interests, the view on China as well started changing as a result. But then, of course, there were all sorts of reasons in which

that hardening of the European approach to China was related to the United States. And especially if you go through the four years under the Biden administration, this became increasingly clear. The

The fact that the transatlantic bond was so strong in those years and that the China conversation was taking place, for instance, in forums like the Trade and Technology Council, essentially meant that as Europeans started toughening up on China, they toughened up, again, as a function of the United States. So no to decoupling.

yes to de-risking. De-risking as a concept would not exist if it wasn't in opposition to decoupling, trying to again soften the sort of hard edges of decoupling. The

The whole conversation at times, frankly speaking, a little bit surreal over NATO in East Asia. I mean, it's fairly clear, especially after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that in a sense, NATO rediscovered itself and it rediscovered itself as having to do with Europe, right? But because of the anxiety in Europe about a US, you know, gradual disengagement from European security, there are all sorts of conversations about, you know, what is it that NATO can do in East Asia? I mean, I personally, as...

is quite obvious from what I just said, never really believed in this. But again, even the security conversation was conditioned by the triangulation between the US, China and Europe. And so the question really is, what now? Yeah, where are we now? You know, what's the answer that you could or should give to your Chinese interlocutors? And the truth is that,

there's a great deal of confusion because of what Rana has just said. Because now we don't quite know where is the US on China, right? You know, Rana basically kind of gave us a sense of the movements behind the scene. And of course, those movements behind the scene also mean that there's a rather incoherent policy approach to China. You know, one day you go for a tariff war that essentially amounts to decoupling.

And the next day you have a deal. One day you kind of go wobbly, wobbly over Taiwan and the U.S. commitment to Taiwan's security. And then you start, then you speak tough on China and yet you do a review of AUKUS, right?

And so Europeans kind of look at this and don't really understand where the U.S. is headed, which kind of means that we don't know where we are, right? Because all of a sudden, we've got to make up our own mind about what we think about China, right? And not develop a policy on China, which is a function of the transatlantic relationship, right?

And so what we do see is that there are several elements which can be, you know, there are several pieces to the puzzle, but the puzzle has basically not been composed yet. So you have some that tilt more towards, in a sense, a more cooperative approach to China.

The first is on the security front. We're kind of single-handedly focused on European security, all the more so given the U.S. possibly rather abrupt disengagement from European security, so we can't really sort of mess around so much in thinking about whatever NATO could be doing in East Asia. So that's one element. A second element, again, tilting towards a more cooperative approach,

especially if the transatlantic trade relationship does not end up in a deal, right, is really a sense of, you know, we don't like China, but we can't have trade wars on all fronts at the same time. So that would also push towards a more cooperative approach. A third element, again, pushing more towards cooperation is the sense of, well, if you have to meet climate neutrality by 2050, we can't do it without China.

But having those three, in a sense, elements there that tilt more towards cooperation, I think it's also fair to say that others push in the entirely opposite direction.

If that trade war with the United States, the China-US trade war continues, perhaps not to the total level of decoupling, but still, you know, a fairly severe one, then the Chinese overcapacity in Europe problem is only going to get graver, and that is probably going to push actually Europe in the opposite direction of kind of toughening up even more towards China. And then, of course, there is the Russia-China dimension to this.

which, as I said, given that Russia has really become the prism through which we understand and try and reconstitute in our own minds what an alternative European security architecture could look like, to the extent to which that Russia-China relationship will remain there, European approach to China will continue to be tough regardless of the United States. Yeah, that's great. I mean, I'm also very interested in

cleavage that you're talking about, I mean, it also, these different views, it plays itself out with respect to different players. Germany and Hungary are in different pages, right? So, John, you have written a lot about the rise of international orders, their decomposition, how they kind of survive under...

I'm wondering where you think we are kind of in this moment, like historically, like how you would understand that some people say, well, you know, this is kind of the end of unipolarity with, you know, kind of that post-Cold War era and international balance, and we're transitioning to some kind of bipolar, maybe Cold War style. Other people see this as,

the U.S. being two players in a multipolar world, and the dynamic would be different. I mean, what's your take on this? Thanks, Peter. It's great to be here, and you're right. I come at these issues as an international relations scholar who...

for my day job, think about the rise and fall of great powers and the way in which international order is organized and reorganized across time. So let me make some points about that that speak to your question, Peter, about where we are now. And I think the first part I would make is that we are in a global power transition. It's an extraordinary one.

We in international relations go all the way back to Thucydides and talk about these moments where one global power or regional power finds a peer and there are contests over order that follow. It tends to be a very dangerous moment across history. And so we have another one unfolding today. And in many ways, it's an extra moment.

power transition because it's not just a power transition, it's at least a triple transition. It's a power transition from unipolarity to some kind of biopolarity

or multi-polarity. We'll speak more about that in a minute. It's also a transition from a Western-dominated international order, which it's been that way for 500 years, to one where the next peer is actually in Asia, so it's from West to East, and it's a transition from a capitalist world

hegemonic state to a rival that is state socialist authoritarian drifting towards totalitarian a different ideology

for sure. And in international relations, we worry about these moments. They are moments where the problems of anarchy come back. Arms races, security competition, contests for hegemony. And beyond that, because it's ideology, at least implicitly in this, different regime principles that are seen as either a

at risk with the rising power that contests those principles or it's an ambition to spread your values beyond your borders, there is that kind of ideological contest. That's what we've seen across the 20th century. It's been a very ideological 100 years. All the great powers that the U.S. has seen itself...

from World War I, World War II, the Cold War onward have been not just great power rivals but ideological rivals. So I think contests for...

world order, what James Burnham called the struggle for the world. It's a great phrase to get at the possibility going forward for big issues. But beyond ideology, power transitions create dangers of miscalculation, of risk-taking, the globalization of regional conflicts into global conflicts, and the uncertainty about the rules of the game. And I'll just come back to that in a moment.

Well, it's actually even more complicated than that because my second point is the United States itself is in upheaval, if you haven't noticed. The 80-year-old American-led order is now kind of up for sale or it's definitely being renegotiated. It's a remarkable spectacle. The U.S., that kind of the zenith of its power is...

is saying, we've had enough of this. Yes, these institutions were created by us and they've elevated us and created influence and projected our interests around the world, but enough of that. We're going to do something different. So there is a kind of oddity, a world historical oddity of a great power turning into a revisionist power that's contesting its own order. Just think about that. That will be an exam question later on. LAUGHTER

So all the other states that are part of this order have either, because they are friendly or not friendly or somewhere in between, have made calculations about their strategic interests based on the presence and persistence of that order.

The American-led order, the world after World War II contracted out to the United States to provide public goods and alliances and security and underwrite economic liberalization. And whoops, all of a sudden, those services, that structure is not certain anymore.

And so states today, as we speak in real time, are making decisions. Do we play for time? Do we appease? Do we suggest to ourselves that maybe it will come back into a kind of equilibrium? Or do we jump to the next order? And I think the implication for U.S.-China relations is this is a real opportunity for China.

The U.S. is misbehaving, given old metrics of norms, and it's a real opportunity for China to step up and provide alternative leadership. But it's ambivalent, I think, because part of that international order that the United States is itself disrupting is an order that allowed China, think of the WTO, to have its best decades in millennia.

China has had its best economic years during the period that we call Pax Americana. And here we have Pax Americana imploding. So I would suspect that there is some ambiguity about Chinese interests in the context of this Trump turn. Third point,

There's other states out there in the world. It's not simply bipolarity. There's the global south. There are these larger aggregations. The Ukraine war, you might have thought that would have united the world into everybody's on the same side to uphold UN charter principles. No, it led to conflict.

retreating to their corners and a kind of world of coalitions and blocks and alignments. And you have what I would call the global West, which is the liberal democracies. Under Biden, it was clearly part of the vision. Under Trump, it's not clear whose side he's on, but it's the global West. There's the global East, which

Russia, uh, and their allies, and then the global South, which is most of humanity, which doesn't necessarily want to choose between the two, uh, global, uh, configurations, uh, but are, uh,

in various ways, and that's creating very interesting possibilities for U.S.-China relations because there's an audience, so to speak. There are other actors with agency and ideas, and there's a quest for legitimacy. And so if hegemony regionally or globally is under contest by Beijing and Washington, what the global south thinks matters, and that possibly can create opportunities

pressures for not a race to the bottom, but a kind of bid to be a good hegemon. John Maynard Keynes called the currency, you want your currency to be attractive. It's like a beauty pageant. You're kind of trying to make your currency attractive. So too, in a contest between hegemonies, that is a possible kind of, at least a secondary thing,

possibility out there. So that's my third point, that we are going to see interesting alignments and competitions unfolding. And then finally, there's a real sentiment out there that we know what we don't want in U.S.-China relations, and that's a cold war.

And just to kind of wake you up, I would say we might actually want something akin to a Cold War in the following sense, that during the Cold War, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, you started to see some features of interaction that led to a kind of maturation of rules of the game under conditions of reciprocity and a kind of symmetry that

neither of us in the near or even medium term are going to take over the world. There's a kind of sense that we're rising maybe, but we're not going to be able to run the world. And if that's true on both sides, and there are growing dangers that are realized, certainly the Cuban Missile Crisis created that jolt that had an impact, but

I would just say that, yes, a Cold War miscalculation, dangers of one kind or another, but there were norms that were built up during the Cold War, and under the rubric of systemic risk, Soviet and American second-tier advisors started to talk to each other, track two, track one and a half, track one,

the Pugwash Movement was launched for Soviet and American scientists to get a common vernacular about how to talk about throw weight and missile size. You have to have a language to talk if you're going to talk. It doesn't guarantee that what you talk about will be what you want. But there were times

There was cooperation. It's not true that a Cold War is simply zero-sum. There was cooperation on arms control, on non-proliferation, on food security, and the Soviets and the Americans worked together to find a cure for smallpox under the auspices of the WHO. Risk

systemic risk as a kind of ideology of why, despite our differences, despite the fact that we may have different visions of modernity, we need to work together. And those norms of not engaging in direct communication

Conflict militarily, yes, there would be proxies. Proxy wars were a big deal during the Cold War. But there was a norm, along with these other aspects that I've suggested, where we aren't going to fight each other directly. And so we're a long way off from anything like that with U.S.-China.

as Ron has said, I don't think there is necessarily an appetite for this, maybe on either side at the moment. But when there is, and if my structural perspective has any efficacy, there will be

that will want to talk despite differences because the stakes in this ever more dangerous world are so great that we have to at least have a back channel to prepare and prevent the worst that could happen. John, that's great. Let's just hope it doesn't take a Cuban Missile Crisis kind of event that could have gone the other way. But...

So, look, I can see where we are on time. I think what I'm going to do is just go directly to opening it up to questions. I'll hold my question and maybe pick it up afterwards. Why don't we take this gentleman in the center here? 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. First off, I'd like to thank all three professors for coming out to speak today. It's been very insightful thus far.

My name is Sid Kochimanchi. I'm an exchange student here at the LSE from the Elliott School at the George Washington University in D.C. I want to touch on something that Professor Eikenberry mentioned about the notion that the U.S. is beginning to question an order that it has supported. Certainly, it feels like the current administration strongly believes that and that an increasingly broader portion of the population is in affirmation of that.

I suppose my question to the panelists is how do we change that? How do we get the U.S. to sort of – and this population to recognize that, hey, the reason the U.S. has been able to become this power is because of this and that despite the challenges that exist in the world, there are innate benefits to maintaining this – the old status quo? Yeah.

And is it possible to even go back to that anymore? Is it already too late to begin with? Great question. I'm going to take a woman right over there. Hi, my name is Susan. I'm a member of the public. I did study at Fudan Daxue in Shanghai a long time ago. Are we seeing the emergence of a kind of energy gap

polarity between the axis of renewables, which I would say is People's Republic, which is producing more renewable energy on its own territory than remotely any other country in the world, and an axis of denial comprising the US, Russia, Saudi, whoever's still producing fossil fuels at this point.

is on an axis of denial. Is that what we're looking at? And is that what underpins basically what Professor Eikenberry has referred to as a struggle for the world? This is existential, not in terms of hegemony or ideology. This is actually human life at stake now. And let's go online. Chris, can you give us a question from online and then I'll come to the panelists.

Thank you. Just to say there are more than 150 people watching online from countries including China, Canada, France, Mexico, Nigeria, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, and the U.S. The question comes from Elijah Han, who is an LSE alum from China. As the U.S. pulls the plug on many of its soft power initiatives and China seeks to fill that gap, how effective has this attempt been and how willing is the rest of the world to accept it?

Okay, that's great. So we've got the last question here is soft power. It seems to have you like written all over it. But you can, we'll let you guys pick and choose and respond to whichever question you would like. Why don't we start with you, Marilyn? Yeah, so I'll actually, in fact, pick up on the first and the second especially question. Sure.

So coming back to John's point, okay, so we are in a power transition. Although this power transition, I mean, and I really like the way he put it in terms of there's a transition of power, but there are also other types of transitions. There's a transition of order.

And whereas up until recently, there was kind of a sense of, OK, fine, you know, you're moving from uni to bi, tri, multi, we don't quite know yet. But, you know, there is a transition of power. Now there is a sense, especially under Trump, that

transition that may then coalesce in several blocks may have completely different organizing principles. And this is what, for instance, sort of makes Europeans so anxious. Because one thing is if you have, for instance, a buy, try, or perhaps even multi-way Europe is a poll system, which

with set rules of the game. And one, and quite another scenario is the transition in which you have a world of empires.

in which it is the rule of, you know, the survival of the fittest, in which you still have, for instance, three poles, right? You still have the US, China, and Russia, and where Europe is on the menu. So you can have a, you know, sort of transition in different power configurations with a completely different nature, which kind of leads, I think, to the question of, you know, is this also...

I haven't thought about this. The axis of renewables and the axis of, in a sense, the old fossil world. And in a sense, Europe had understood itself as really being a leader on that front. Now we basically see Europe itself actually rowing back on many of its own commitments, or perhaps rather not talking about them.

in ways which is actually paradoxical in the sense that actually precisely because Europe, for instance, does not produce fossil fuels, it would actually make sense to move towards, in a sense, a sort of world of renewables in which once upon a time it was the leader and now, as you say, indeed that position has been taken by China.

But paradoxically, as it rose back and it kind of wants to latch on to an old world, it's an old world in which it actually didn't have a lot of power precisely because it wasn't producing those fossil fuels. So I think, you know, part of the state of confusion that Europeans are in have also to do with this energy dimension.

That's great. John, why don't we go to you? On the first question, how do we tame America? How do we get America to wake up and realize that its interests are this more expansive view of how to put power and purpose together for national but also international ends? And I confess it is a...

How do you do this? Partly, we will see what the Trump experiment is like, and my view is that it will be seen as not conducive to building American influence.

wealth, power, security, that it's in fact a harmful self-harm kind of policy. I think you also have to make the case that there is a type of order out there that an enlightened self-interest great power would want to pursue and has pursued successfully over decades and decades, an order that does...

argue that open trade at properly managed is good for you and others. So David Ricardo had some ideas that are not wrong even if you let Alexander Hamilton into the house, you don't kick out the ideas that there's mutual gain from exchange. International institutions still matters, a cooperative organization to solve problems, global problem solving.

What kind of international order? And this is a question. If you were to go into your laboratory and try to dream up an international order that could be, if it could be organized, which kind of order with institutions, architecture, rules, would be most conducive to global problem solving given 21st century problems? What would it be? I think it would be an open multilateral order where you would have...

I think democracies who are historically most...

incentivize to organize global order that goes beyond the older alternatives. And so I think that's the kind of order it would be. It would be one that I think we had in an important way for 80 years after World War II, one that was trying to navigate a kind of third way between empire and raw anarchy and

world history, that alternative has never really been done until the 20th century. An open system where open societies can interact, it's almost too complicated to do, but we have done it, so I think you have to make the case. And hopefully the alternatives out there will help you make the case by their inadequacies. Rana?

Yeah, so let me say something quickly about soft power and China's capacity to produce this.

I think many of you here will know, which is worth noting, that the term, of course, was invented 30 years ago, slightly over 30 years ago, by our late and very dear colleague in the field, Professor Joseph S. Nye. I always like to say that for wisdom, China looked to Zhou Enlai, and here in the West we look to Zhou S. Nye. So the two were in some ways, I think, able to come up with thoughts that had influence well beyond their own patches.

One of the things that was, I think, broadly true of soft power, and remember what it is, it's the ability to be able to get others, other countries, to do what you want because of the power of your example through persuasion rather than coercion and force. So those people use it as a shorthand for cultural power, like movies or whatever, which is not a very precise account of what it is.

And I want to stick to that more precise definition that Joe Nye put forward, because it was said for a long time that China couldn't do this. You know, China was great on growing the economy, second biggest economy in the world, built up its military to the second biggest military in the world. But when it came to soft power, it was a really, a minnow, you know, a tiny little fish in a big ocean in the US, because...

In this Cold War, America had freedom, it had Coca-Cola, it had blue jeans, you know, all of that. That was where the story was at in terms of persuading others that you wanted to be like them. Fast forward to today, as we've been saying over and over again, and you notice just by opening your eyes and looking out the window and across the globe,

We are living in an era where overall those sorts of liberal Cold War and post-Cold War values seem to have lost a lot of their attraction in the wider world, not just in the West, but beyond that, in large part because the economic promise that they had embedded in them doesn't seem to have worked out at all well.

And as a result, we're living in a world in general where there is at least more of an audience out there for a more authoritarian view of the world. It could either be straight out dictatorship or in some cases it's just a more authoritarian turn within the electoral system. Hungary, Turkey, you know, you can name your examples.

So if you look at a specific example, let's take India, a country which is still an electoral democracy, unlike China, but which has moved in a direction which is more top-down, more inclined to be at least have the flavor of that kind of authoritarian feel about the political culture.

you will find plenty of people, maybe there are some here today, from the Indian elite as well as diaspora and actually from some of the wider emerging middle class who look at China with some apprehension because of the security concerns on the border that have existed for a long time but also more and more with admiration. The feeling that when it comes to technology and not just the

the practical applications of technology which is about you know geoeconomics in a sense but about the soft power part the glamour you know buying a xiaomi buying an honor you know buying one of these brands that essentially is you know seen in huge parts of the world particularly the global south

where China is seen as a trendsetter, bringing cheap and very effective design to a wider population, and actually, in the views of many, bringing freedoms, not political freedoms in terms of liberal pluralism, but in terms of the capacity to be able to take your phone and pay for what you want, creating new business opportunities. Those are freedoms that lots of people in India perceive China to have had, to have grown its economy at a clip rate,

a clipping pace as a result and find themselves in many cases saying, well, maybe if we were a bit more like China, we wouldn't want everything from China. But somehow there is something there that's attractive. Now, I hasten to add, just in case there's any confusion, that I personally think that actually over time, more liberal societies tend to be actually the ones that work out best in the long run.

there's no doubt that the kind of sleight of hand you could have said just a few years ago, that actually it tended to be liberal democratic societies that dominated soft power. I'm not sure that that case is so clear anymore. I'm mindful where we are on time. We've got five minutes to work with here. I think maybe what I'll do is ask you...

maybe a question to kind of close on. I mean, you know, it's very common to ask what keeps you awake at night when you think about the... Coffee. Yeah. Me too. Your next question is what keeps us awake. But I guess maybe, and John, you spoke a little bit to this in your fourth point. Maybe what gives you hope in terms of the relationship going forward and the possibilities for...

it's stabilizing and not going off the rails and staying within some set of parameters. Maybe we should go in reverse here, John, and maybe I'll start with you. You can elaborate maybe on your earlier point and then kind of come down the path here. Well, I think that we should start with suggesting that we don't know where things are headed. I think one of the

implications of this moment were in for scholars of international relations is that we didn't know what we thought we knew. Lots of surprises, lots of reason to rethink and to be humble about various parts of your theoretical understanding of the world. I confess that I was one who

thought that China would be, in the post-Cold War period, very much on the path of integration and transformation and liberalization, not to become a liberal democracy, but would be...

stakeholder that would see the incentives for being inside of the tent, growing wealthy and finding new voices inside of society for pluralism and rule of law and all those sorts of things.

It didn't go that way. And that was really a kind of blow to the liberal order. If you would say that some of the real blows that have been suffered by the liberal international order since the end of the Cold War, it would be the China bet that didn't work out, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Iraq war. All three have undermined...

internationalist voices and ways of thinking in the United States and other parts of the Western world. So we are, to some extent, if I could tie that point of uncertainty to U.S.-China relations, I do think that there is a certain kind of key point

keep the good offices open. There's a sense that there's a certain sobriety and sense inside of the United States that we suffer many of the same ills that other countries do. We're not exceptional in all those great ways that maybe we thought we were in the glow of the liberal moment in the 1990s.

So we have a lot to learn from others. We don't have all the ideas that the world needs. And then I think on the China side, I think that Xi's narrative of inevitability, the two narratives, it's inevitable that the West will decline and it's inevitable that we will rise, I think those are not at all narratives that are very persuasive at all today.

So I think both superpowers are at a point where maybe you want to...

provide an opportunity for not betting everything on your own preeminence, but to look for those negotiated arrangements that provide some peaceful coexistence. So I think it's in the structure of things for that kind of dynamic to emerge.

Natalie, why don't we turn to you here? So two points, perhaps. I mean, the first is, in a sense, as a consequence of what I said, you know, thinking about the U.S.-China relationship and the Europe angle to this,

It is simply no longer possible for Europe to not have a policy, right? It's simply not possible anymore, given what is happening, especially in the transatlantic relationship, for Europe to simply say, well, you know, China's going to be apart.

and a competitor and a rival, right? Because that's not a policy. So given that there isn't that triangle anymore, at least at the moment, in a sense, Europe is forced to have a policy, right? So I think in an odd kind of way, I think that's good news because I think we can. And I think the second element, I'm not quite sure whether to define it good news, but I'll try and find a positive twist to it,

is one in which, you know, if we are in this, I mean, if the US-China relationship is headed to pure conflict, then obviously that's catastrophic and there's nothing that Europeans can do about it. I do think that there is another scenario, which though is perhaps not as threatening, but still fairly threatening, which is one in which the US and China are in cahoots over dismantling rules and norms, right? Right.

That is a threatening scenario for Europeans, and I think that puts the onus on Europeans, in a sense, or the rest of the West, to reach out to the rest to try and see whether there is a possible reconstitution of some level of order. Well, that's an interesting positive spin. I like that. I like that. That's great. Thank you. Rona, you get to take this home. Okay. Well, I would say that for me, the positive element, I think it is a positive element,

is that something that was said in China a few years ago, three or four years ago during the pandemic, has turned out to be wrong. So many of you will know, particularly if you're in China at that time, that there was this internet meme going around the whole time with angry, dissatisfied youth saying, we're the last generation, almost threatening that they're not going to have kids, they're not going to be there for future generations if things didn't change.

But I think the counter-argument, the very important counter-argument to that cry of despair from three or four years ago is sitting right here at the London School of Economics. It's very clear that those of you who have come from China to study here, 你们的世界观是很开放的,是很国际化的。

You're internationalized. You have come to the wider world to learn about it, but also to bring back aspects of that openness to China as well. And for those of you who are not getting the bits of Chinese that I'm saying will possibly could do it better, it's also part of the wider dialogue.

that is going to have to open up between the Western world, the wider global South, and China as well. It is evidently clear that we are not going to have shared interests, and there are real... We're not going to have shared interests in all areas.

And there are real issues, including security concerns, that will bring a breach between the two sides. But when it comes to education, when it comes to climate change, when it comes to a whole variety of issues to do with the global commons overall, the fact that we're sitting right now in one of the world's great educational institutions,

institutions where we have students from this country, the UK, from the wider world and from China is what gives me a great deal of positivity about where we'll go next. That is a wonderful place to leave it. Please join me in thanking the panelists for a terrific discussion. Thank you.

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