In conversation with Alexander Stubb
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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. Morning, everyone, and welcome. For those who don't know, my name is Larry Kramer. I am the president and vice chancellor here at LSE. And it's my very great privilege and pleasure to welcome you to the historic Shaw Library for this very special event hosted by LSE's European Institute.

Today is actually my 365th day as this university's president, and it is also, by coincidence, my first opportunity to introduce a rather more important president to speak. So while I hope I'll have many more such opportunities, I'm going to relish this one a little bit. Our guest this morning, Alexander Stubb, is the 13th president of the Republic of Finland.

He's an extraordinary public servant and a genuine subject matter expert on the multilateral system, which he will discuss with you this morning. In his current office, which he's held since March 1st, 2024, he conducts Finland's foreign policy in coordination with the prime minister and his cabinet. But President Stubb's diplomatic and international expertise rests on far more than that.

During a wide and varied political career, he has served as a member of the European and Finnish parliaments, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Minister for European Affairs and Trade, Minister of Finance, Leader of the National Coalition Party, and from 2014 to 2015, Prime Minister of Finland.

Between his stints in public service, President Stubb worked as vice president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and as a professor and director of the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Florence. Of course, his greatest achievement is having earned his doctorate in international relations from LSE under the supervision of Lord William Wallace.

Since then, and armed with that, he's written widely on international affairs, including on European integration, the subject of his doctoral thesis. And he was undoubtedly headed for a sterling academic career before making the unfortunate choice to enter into public life. Unfortunate for us, fortunate for the public. On top of which, demonstrating a breadth of talent that depresses one-dimensional people like me, he also competed with the Finnish national golf team.

Okay, the President will speak for about 15 minutes, after which there will be a chance for you to put your questions to him. When the time comes, please raise your hand. Someone will bring you a microphone. When called upon, just give us your name and affiliation and pose one hopefully short question. And with that, it's my very great pleasure to invite the President of the Republic of Finland, Dr. Alexander Stubb, to the lecture. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. President, for those kind words. Always with these sort of seedy introductions, I find them a little bit embarrassing. And I'm reminded of Henry Kissinger when once he was introduced in a similar manner. He said that, well, you don't really need to say that, but it is nice to listen to you.

How far from it? It's really nice to be back at the LSE, and I have to admit that I was never invited into this lovely space and room at my time here. I spent only two years here from 1997 to 1999, and my PhD was about differentiated integration, or actually flexible integration. It was for the IR department and very much focused on the EU,

And the basic thesis was that in the European Union, not everyone needs to do everything at the same time. And I had this categorical, of course, three-point analysis of what flexibility could look like. And when I look at the world today, and especially at Europe, I look at the place of the United Kingdom in the European Union. I look at the variable memberships that we seem to be having inside the EU. I have to admit that we are pretty close to a flexible world.

Now, what I'll do today is I'm going to pan out a little bit because I just, well, I don't know if it'll pan out or not, but I just finished a manuscript of a book which I'd been working on for four years. I started working on it at Florence. And the book is called The Triangle of Power, Rebalancing the New World Order.

And it's basically about trying to understand what's going on in the world. And I'll follow in what I'm going to say pretty much the outline of the book itself, which hopefully will be published sometime in the fall. And I'll do it by giving you an introduction, three points, and a conclusion. And...

I did start writing the book pretty much on the day that President Trump finished his first term in office in 2021. And I finished writing the book pretty much when he began his second term in 2025, which means that I have done a few revisions towards the end.

Before I start, though, if I may give all of the students here a piece of advice. I've always been a firm believer in combining theory and practice. I'm very much a follower of E.H. Carr, not necessarily in his international relations, but in his professional career, which means that

If you're in academia, you get a really good theoretical framework of what the world might look like, or even in some cases, what you want it to look like.

But when you are in civil service or politics in international relations, you get a taste of what the world is actually like. And combining the two and oscillating between the two is never a bad thing. Not for an academic, not for a diplomat, and not for a politician. And I've been very fortunate in my life to be able to do that. So let's begin by the introduction. I think...

there are those moments in history when you really feel that an order is changing. And I think we are in the midst of one of those moments. So we're living, I would argue, or your generation, our generation is living the 1918, 1945 or 1989 moment in history. Sort of when you know that the old world order has died, but you don't really know where it's going yet.

And of course, in many ways, you know, we can either get it wrong, more or less right, or we can be indifferent about it. So in 1918, and especially after Wilson's plan to set up a League of Nations, we realized that it failed. It wasn't strong enough. We ended up with World War II. After World War II, the leaders of the time more or less succeeded.

They created the United Nations. We had a bipolar world with the Soviet Union and the U.S. But the power balance was there. The institutional structure was there. We didn't go into World War III. Of course, in 1989, when I began studying, we thought that history ended. There was this feeling that all 200 nation states in the world are going to revert to some form of a combination of democracy and

or liberal democracy, I guess, social market economy and globalization. So there was this promise, this light of a better future. Remember, 200 nation states. And now what happened then, of course, was that we got a bit, I don't know, lethargic, I guess, in our intellectual or ideological vigor. We thought that, of course, everyone wants to be a democracy. Everyone wants social market economy and everyone wants globalization. But it didn't happen.

Now, by way of comparison, when you guys are studying here, either doing a BA, a master's or a PhD, you're facing a similar type of a situation, trying to understand international relations.

The difference, of course, being that I think in 1989, we kind of saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Now we're seeing a bit of darkness at the end of the tunnel. But my message to you today is that, you know, you can't detach yourself from the realities of world politics. You can't be deterministic and think that things are going to go one way. All of you have agency to do something about it. And I, of course, recommend everyone to do something about it.

So, let's then begin number one, order, number two, balance, and number three, dynamics. So, what's the world order like or what did it used to be like? Well, I guess after World War II, it was quite clear the world was bipolar.

It was ideological and the competition was systemic. So you had the Soviet Union representing communism, collectivization, authoritarian regimes, limiting freedom in favor of the state. And on the other side, you had the United States.

in so many different variations representing liberal democracy, capitalism and freedom. And these two poles were battling it out with one place in where they tried to get along or find compromises and that was the United Nations. There was a sense that there's a strong international institution where you have a set of rules

with which nation states abide, more or less. But at the same time, we could say that Yalta, exactly 80 years ago, carved up the world in spheres of interest. Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt met at Yalta and said, "This is what Europe looks like. This is what the world looks like. And by the way, we're going to have a U.S. Security Council with five members and veto power for those members." So there was this balance. That was the order.

Then, when the Cold War ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and then I guess subsequently with 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union, we entered a unipolar world. That was a unipolar moment where the United States was the undisputed superpower of the world economically, politically, and from a security perspective in general.

And there was this feeling that here we have this guiding light which is taking us towards liberal democracy, capitalism and globalization. And of course we saw various independence movements around the world and the flourishing of new nation states pretty much on every continent. I myself studying at the time became a firm believer in Fukuyama's end of history thesis. I really liked it. It was appealing.

There was a sense of sort of idealism, optimism in it. You combine that with modern technology and you thought, now we're going to see the world flourish. I mean, who would ever want to be in an authoritarian system? Why should they be constrained and shackled out of the world of freedom? Then we can debate about when the change in the order began. We could take 9-11, when a lot of Western states led by the United States

basically went more for interests and security, in other words fighting terrorism than values and democracy. There was a sentiment that you could actually democratize nation states through wars. We could take Georgia in 2008, the Lehman Brothers in 2008 as a turning point. The Euro crisis, the failure of the financial structure of the West,

We could look perhaps at a smaller scale at the asylum crisis in Europe 2015, or we could take Brexit 2016. But there was a sentiment that we were moving towards not a unipolar world, but a multipolar world.

Of course, Europe had its problems. The U.S. had its problems. A lot of democracies saw the emergence of different populist type of movements. At the same time, we saw state capitalism giving dividends in China and elsewhere and showing that, well, perhaps there are alternative models that can work.

But for me as a Finn, the culmination point of the end of the old order is the 24th of February 2022 when Russia attacked Ukraine full scale. Because, of course, remember it had attacked Georgia in 2008. It had annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. And there was a more or less hot war going on.

in the eastern flank of Ukraine ever since 2014 with different types of temperatures going up and down. But that for me was the moment. And that's kind of the beginning, I guess, in many ways of my book as well. I started with a text message exchange with the foreign minister of Russia

I was at Florence at the time and I still had his number. So three days into the war, I sent him a text message saying that, you know, Sergei, please, please stop this madness. You're the only one who can stop him. And he answered, who do you mean, Zelensky or Biden? So what I'm trying to say is that there is an element of cynicism sometimes in international relations. And after a...

less rather than more fruitful exchange of eight or nine messages, I decided, okay, I'll leave it be. But for me, especially as a Finn, this was a big moment when I realized that now the basic tenets of the international order as we knew it, based on the tripod of independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of a nation state was violated.

Then of course one thing has led to another and we've seen a change in the world order by and large. So right now I would argue that we are in the middle of a change of an order where you really have two more or less opposing tenets. One is multipolarity, which as we can see is leading to an a la carte rather messy disorder

When someone leaves a field of international relations, a power vacuum emerges and someone is out there to fill it, whether it's in Sudan, whether it's in the Middle East, whether it's in Ukraine. And on the other side, you actually have this...

in my mind at least, dream of a continuation of a multilateral world order where there are strong international institutions and rules which you abide by. My second point today is about the balance and I've simplified it in this book into a triangle of power and my argument is that you have the global West, the global East and the global South.

So the global West is more or less 50 states, at least to a point led by the United States, which I now of course argue that is shifting because of the approach of the current administration, which is different from previous one. I'm not making a value judgment whether it's wrong or right. I'm just making a realistic statement that it's different and difference you have to live with in foreign policy.

This system, at least previously, wanted to preserve the current order. On the other side, you have roughly 25 countries led by China in the global east, followed, of course, by the likes of Russia, perhaps Iran, North Korea, and 20, 21 other states that vote with them in the UN.

more or less. They want to change the order. If you look at the rhetoric of Russia, for instance, it's all about changing the world order based on nationhood and sovereignty. Read Russian spheres of interest. And China saying that, yes, we want a multipolar world which is not led by, aka, the United States. My thesis is that the one who's going to decide the new world order

is the global south. And I know that it's unfair to lump 125 countries together, but you have key swing states that will have an impact of what the world order will look like. The likes of India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico.

And this is regardless of the triangle of power between the global west, global east, and the global south, and regardless of what the United States is going to do. And my argument is that if the global west wants to win this game, in other words, preserving at least the remnants of the current world order, then it needs to reach out

to the global south. And I have defined a concept which I call values-based realism and dignified foreign policy of a way in which you do it. So you have to understand that you stay true to your values. So in our case, or at least in my case, democracy, freedom, protection of minorities, rule of law,

equality, justice. But you realize that in order for you to solve the world's big problems, climate change, technology, pandemics, development, immigration, you can't do it with people who are, well, only Finnish or Swedish, if you know what I mean, or Nordic. So you come to this realization. What is interesting for me now as a political scientist and student of IR is that I thought that we would use values-based realism

towards the global south and the global east. But there seems to be a tendency now that you have to use values-based realism also inside the global west. So that's kind of changed, I think, the game. That's why I still see it as a fairly useful tool.

Then my third and final point before I conclude is to say that, yes, we have an order. Yes, we have this balance, which is a triangle of power. Now, what are the dynamics? And here, very shortly, I'll cut corners. There are three dynamics, competition, conflict, and cooperation. And my argument is that competition is good as long as there are rules around it.

So it's okay to have geopolitical competition. It's good to have economic competition or technological competition because that actually advances humanity and mankind. But the problem is if you don't contain that competition, have rules for it, if it's only transactional and deal-based, you end up in conflict. And what we saw after the Cold War was local conflict, right? It was very much sort of civil wars, if you will.

there was very rarely a regional conflict as we're seeing now, you know, with, for instance, in the Middle East or with Russia's aggression in Ukraine, let alone the third one, which is a global conflict, which things can spill over into. So my argument is that we need cooperation. And the simple reason is self-interest. If you want to solve climate change, if you want to solve AI,

if you want to solve immigration, if you want to solve development, if you want to solve the energy crisis, you cannot go it alone. So you need to cooperate. And right now when the world is in a flux, I hope that we can sort of come back to the mode of cooperation. Again, I stress agency. You can't detach yourself from the realities that we are in right now. You can only try to impact it. And therefore I conclude that I think...

The rejigging of the New World Order will take somewhere between five to ten years. And obviously, you know, you have different scenarios. I go through those in my conclusions. I won't reveal them here. But different possibilities of the direction in which the world will go. But I hope that, you know, we don't get it wrong, as they did after World War I.

I hope that we don't get lazy as we did after the Cold War when I was studying. So this is a call for you guys to get serious about what you're doing. And I hope that we get it more or less right as the leaders did after World War II.

I think the new world order that we create in the next decade or so will actually define the world towards the end of the century. So it'll be very much that type of a moment that we are dealing with. And of course, finally, if you want my two cents of the triangle of power, it can be a triangle of power between the global West, global East and global South. That's kind of the Helsinki solution.

of the OSCE in 1975, or it can be a Yalta solution, which is a triangle of power between China, Russia, and the United States. With these words, happy to have a conversation. Thanks.

So thank you. We do have time for some questions. I'm going to pose the first one. I'm curious. Only because you presented the three poles as themselves kind of relatively unified in terms of what their values are and what they're after. And I wonder whether you can actually still say that about the West.

So, you know, as we look around and see the challenges coming to all those values, right, to democracy and to the way in which we've thought about liberal democracy and so on, how do you fit that in? How do you explain that? That arguably predates democracy.

predates 2000s, the beginnings of that. So I'm just curious how that fits into the analysis. Yeah, I mean, I guess the starting point is that you have to look at the concept of statehood and what constitution says about the organization of society, including, of course, liberal democracy. And I'm an avid student of

the United States Constitution, the founding fathers, the Federalist Papers, and the history of not only American Constitution and constitutional law, but politics as well. So I think we probably sometimes mix the notion of statehood with ideology.

We have to understand that in democracy you have various ideologies and you also have various identities. And right now in the United States, which I assume you're alluding to, we're seeing a swing of the pendulum towards the right. So is it similar that what we've seen previously? My answer is no.

and that does bring some diversity into the global West. But again, in foreign policy, you quite often have to face realities and live with it. Having said all of that, and linked to the United States, and you might know that I'm an avid transatlanticist. I was a rare breed in Finland, always speaking pro-American and advocating Finnish NATO membership.

I think that there are always in U.S. history presidents that change the direction of the country. I think FDR, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal was an example thereof. I think American presidents followed his suit. Then I think Ronald Reagan and neoliberal economic policy

was an example thereof. I think George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama followed suit. And I actually think that the change in U.S. foreign policy started already in 2016 with the first Trump administration, where the line was very much America first.

Because if you look then at the policies of the Biden administration, the IRS type of things, it was very much along these lines. And if you look at the national security strategy of October 2022, you'll see that there's sort of this detachment from multilateralism more towards unholy or holy alliances like the Quad Alliance.

among... Or AUKUS, among others. And now we're just seeing sort of the next stage of an America First foreign policy, which is a little bit different from, of course, what we're used to in Europe. But as I always say, we have to deal with it. But you don't see that happening in Europe as well? Maybe a little behind? Sweden, Netherlands, France, Germany? Yeah. Again, it's sort of an ideological and identity-based change. A swing, I think...

funnily enough, both to the right and left, and of course extremes quite often meet. I come from a country where the onslaught of more populistic movements started in earnest in 2011 with the true Finns, as they were called at the time, getting an election victory but not wanting to be in government. And then in 2015, I was in government,

for the first time with what's now called the Finns Party. And now of course the government that we have in Finland right now has the Finns Party in it and they have changed tack. We've seen similar type of movements around Europe

But then again, you have to ask yourself the question, what happens when you get into power? And what I'm seeing with a lot of the right-wing movements, say, you know, Giorgio Meloni in Italy or the Finns Party in Finland, is when responsibility comes, you might not like what's coming out of there,

But the line that they take is actually eventually quite responsible. And I've certainly experienced that both in Finland and elsewhere. But yeah, this is what democracy is about. This is why I kept on telling you guys in the beginning, there's a world that you want to see, right? And then there's a world which is a reality. And you have to learn how to distinguish between the two. So there are going to be things that you're upset about, which you disagree with fundamentally.

But then you have to ask yourself the question, okay, what do I do about it? Do I try to have impact? Do I change it? And if that's the case, how do I do it? And that's why I keep on saying to everyone, you know, in democracy, you can always have agency. In an autocracy, you can't have that. Okay, so we have time for questions from the audience. Where's the microphone? There you are, right over here. Good morning. Thank you for your talk. It was really inspiring. My name is Federico. I'm a student in the European Institute. I'm doing a double degree with Bocconi.

You mentioned agency and it was particularly, it caught really much of my attention the reference to your text with Mr. Lavrov. So I want to ask to what degrees do emotions play a role in the personal decision making of Russian leaders rather than rational calculations for example and looking more inwards into our alliances?

What leader do you think is best suited to strategically, personally and ideologically to try, if possible, to soften transposition on Europe? Many theorists thought Meloni could. Sarmer is doing a decent job on it. Who could do it? Thank you. It's a good and a big question. The first answer I have is I'm not going to do a psychoanalysis of Russian leaders. That's for sure. And in diplomacy, of course, you have your own personal views about different types of leaders.

In my experience, most of the time when you meet them, the exchange behind closed doors is actually quite amicable and respectful, but it can be also quite straightforward and truthful. Our analysis on Russia is very realistic and quite simple. And that is to say that there's a tendency of Russian leaders throughout history to

to revert towards some form of imperialism. That is the existence of the Russian state.

In other words, territorial inquisition and expansion. That was what the Soviet Union in many ways was all about. That was what the attack on Georgia was. That's what the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and then the subsequent war of aggression has been. It's about...

preventing the identity of statehood of Ukraine. And then instead of looking at the rational mentality of Russian leaders, look at what they say and then try to figure out why they say it.

President Putin has talked about Raskimir, Great Russia, which is basically Russia of the 1800s, which has one state, one religion, one language, and one leader, himself. I presume he wants to see himself in a line of great Russian leaders and czars, from Catherine the Great to Peter the Great,

to Stalin to a certain extent. And that is why he's doing what he's doing. And then you sort of draw your analysis from that. I do think that personality matters, which is kind of a good thing, especially for small states in the sense that you can have impact. You don't go in with a big muscle. You go in with a brain and try to then influence people. So you...

And I've always believed in that very strongly. And that's why I have also tried always to conduct what I call a dignified foreign policy. It doesn't matter who I talk to or who I talk with. I go in with the questions rather than the moral high ground. And that's usually quite useful, I think, in diplomacy. Thank you. So there's a hand all the way in the back. All the way. That one's been up the whole time, though. Okay.

Now, back to the event.

Good morning, President. Thank you for a very interesting talk and raising up very interesting points. Can you speak up a little bit or keep the mic closer? Yeah.

Good morning, President. Thank you for bringing up some very interesting points. I was wondering, given the changes you highlighted in the world order, what do you think are the prospects for a fully-fledged world government to rise in the next few decades? Take that again. A little bit slower and a little bit louder. So what are the prospects of? A world government emerging in the next few decades. A world government in the next few days? In the decades. Decades, okay. Whoa. You know something I don't know, man. Maybe about the same, though. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's a really good question and it's hard to say, and I sort of tried to poke into that in the book as well. Of course, my preference would be that there would be not so much a world governance, but a system which is based on an international institutional order. And I still think that the core of that system is the United Nations, because the core aim of the United Nations is to preserve peace.

And then under that is a system of governance. And you have different tenets to it. You know, in the financial world, it's about the World Bank and the IMF. In the trade world, it's about the WTO. In climate, it's about COP and so on and so forth. And I, of course, hope that we would have that because that prevents this idea of, you know, power by might. But for there to be some kind of a world order, you know, governance system in

It's probably not going to happen. It's going to be more complicated, more a la carte.

I think what we all need to follow very closely, and I hope many of you are writing your thesis on, is the impact of technology on international relations and the fact that through artificial intelligence, through robotization, through quantum computing, through biotechnology or bioengineering, we're basically changing the economy, the way in which we work, politics, the way in which we communicate, war, the way in which we conduct it.

and science and the way in which we are as human beings. So when I began writing the book, as a matter of fact, the title was Digital Democracy or Digital Dictatorship. So we need to look at all of these things at a time. Perhaps my humble piece of advice is to say that

you know, in life or in international relations, there's no finalite, no end state, that we're always talking about a process. And that's what IR is at the end of the day all about. And then the process goes in different directions. Right now, I personally feel it's going in the wrong direction and I kind of want to drag it back a little bit, if you know what I mean.

So the woman who – the student – yeah, right. You don't know their names? No, no, no, forward. Yes, there. Dear Mr. President, thank you so much for this inspiring speech. And my question, given Finland's strong support for Ukraine and your recent discussions with both President Zelenskyy and Donald Trump,

How do you see Finland's role and possibly your own role in ensuring that any potential ceasefire generally supports Ukraine's sovereignty and long-term security? Thank you so much. Thanks a lot. I have to admit that the past week has been really interesting for me personally and our team in terms of international diplomacy because a week and a half ago on Wednesday,

We had President Zelensky and Mrs. Zelenskaya in Helsinki for a full day, actually two nights. So I had a chance, we had a chance to spend a lot of personal time. And President Zelensky actually called Trump

from Helsinki, so I got a rundown on that one. Then on Thursday we were in Paris, a meeting of the Coalition of the Willing, convened by France and the UK. And by the way, a little parenthesis, UK is back, and I'm really happy about that, in Europe and in world politics. This is very important to keep in mind. End of parenthesis. Then after that I flew to Florida, and I spent the better part of seven hours with President Trump

on Saturday, so sort of get a picture of the mindset, more in a social setting, informal setting, which is always better than a meeting room, and always better than a press conference, trust me. And now today I'm seeing Prime Minister Starmer, and of course then having a multitude of phone conversations in between. So my sort of quick take is that the first thing you need to do is separate two things, ceasefire and peace agreement.

Ceasefire is still a state of war. It's an agreement between two warring parties that they stop the fighting, air, land and sea, and they stop the killing. And then that ceasefire is monitored, there's a demarcation of border, which is not final. It's just an agreement to stop the guns blazing and then begin the negotiations. Negotiations will take a long time. And then, at the end of the day, you reach a peace agreement. I can only speak as a Finn.

So our historical experience from World War II, which for us was the Winter War and the War of Continuation, was that two out of the three principles of statehood in our case was violated in 1944 with the peace of Stalin. We maintained our independence, which we're grateful for, our veterans. So as a state, we existed, unlike all the other bordering states, the Soviet Union, which lost their independence, basically.

Secondly, we lost our sovereignty, our sovereign right to decide which clubs we belong to. We couldn't join the Nordic Council in the beginning. We couldn't join EFTA in the beginning. We couldn't even join the Council of Europe until 1987 because the Soviet Union prevented us in so many words for doing it. And then thirdly, we lost 10% of our territory, including Karelia where my grandparents and my father were born.

How do I relate this to Ukraine? Let's make sure this does not happen to Ukraine. So for Ukraine, it's absolutely clear they will maintain their independence. It's super important that they maintain their sovereignty, sovereign right to decide to join the European Union and eventually NATO.

And then let's make sure that their territorial integrity is not violated. I know it's an uphill battle, but we need to work at it. And that's why my message to President Trump on Saturday was, Mr. President, we need a ceasefire and we need a deadline for that ceasefire. And that ceasefire would be, in my mind, quite handy to have on the 20th of April because of Easter and because of the fact that then President Trump will have been in office for three months.

But in order for that ceasefire to stick, which by the way has been accepted by everyone else except Russia, it has been accepted by Ukraine, it has been proposed by the US, accepted by Ukraine and backed by Europe, but violated by Russia. In order for that to stick, you need a stick. In other words, colossal sanctions if Russia doesn't stick to it. And that way we stop the killing,

and start the negotiations and make sure that international law is respected. And this is what diplomacy right now is all about. And remember, there are two levels of diplomacy. One is public diplomacy, which sometimes in today's world seems to be a bit rough on the verbal side. And then there is private diplomacy, and I think a lot of us are engaged in that right now. I actually think that the latter is more important than the former. I do have to ask as part of...

informal diplomacy with President Trump, did you let him win? We were on the same team. So, no, no. No, no. Again, you know...

It's funny, I really, I mean, golf changed my life because I went to Furman because of golf. And I wasn't academically inclined, and then suddenly I noticed, you know, I'm not going to become a golf professional, and I love international relations. So that was in 1990. I basically stopped golf, boom, like that. And my dad had told me that, you know, whatever happens with your golf, remember, it'll be useful in life at some stage. I was going, come on, Dad. So here I am. No, I mean, it's...

Golf, cycling, whatever activity outside of a negotiating room is very useful.

I come from a small country. To spend seven hours with the President of the United States, you don't do that in a meeting room, right? And we had actually Lindsey Graham and then one of my childhood idols, Gary Player, on our team. So you can realize that because it was sort of a club tournament and championship, it was best ball. So when you have Gary Player and Donald Trump on your team, you end up winning. So let's come over here. There's a mic there.

Thank you very much, President. It's a great honor for us to see you here. And while you were talking about these issues, it kind of seems that the current geopolitical problems kind of overshadow the other vital problems that matter to us, such as the climate change. And I remember in last November, you were one of the active parties

in COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. So I was wondering whether you have a place for climate issues and these kind of negotiations towards the Baku-Turpan process and related issues in your book. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. It's certainly a part of the big narrative, but for me in the book actually climate change is part of the why we need cooperation rather than conflict.

that if we don't solve the climate issue, then the world will only be conflict. The problem in international relations and diplomacy is you quite often only focus on one thing at a time. And right now it's very much focused on conflict. And of course here I've only been speaking about Ukraine, but we look at the situation in the Middle East,

And actually, the worst conflict, arguably, is in Sudan right now. We don't talk about that. So if we don't solve the climate crisis, we're going to start seeing climate-based conflict. And my simple answer to this is, of course, simplification.

In that case, you need three things. One, you need norms, some kind of laws and agreement towards target. That's what COP29 was about, and that's what COP30 will be in Brazil as well. Second, you'll need finance. And then, of course, that's finance or burden sharing between the global south and the global west, but also finance to get the third thing right, which is innovation. Because in my mind, obviously, you can't...

sort of legislate, you can't finance yourself out of this crisis. You have to do it through modern technology and technological innovations because I don't see consumption for us as human beings going down. Therefore, you have to think about how you consume in a more sustainable way. But I think that once these three conflicts are more or less solved,

Ukraine, war of aggression of Russia on Ukraine, Middle East and Sudan, then we start focusing on climate change again. And I think there actually competition will be useful. I think the countries that deny climate change and take anti-climate change activities right now, they will fall behind.

So that's why I don't, for instance, you know, if I was an investor, I would not be banking on the Russian economy because it's completely based on fossil fuels. There's zero innovation in Russia apart from military innovation. So, you know, let's keep on working at it. And it is a part of the book, but not the main theme. So I think we have time for just one more question. And let's go to this woman here in the red. Thank you very much. I actually wanted our...

Finnish student to ask the question. So to make that sure, we both raised our hands. Look, Finns hedge their bets, you know. That's a really smart move, that, by the way. Yeah, Finland, even cooler than you think. Yes. I will say that there are a few Finns in the room today, so I'm not the only one. Can I get some hands up for the Finns? Just for the Finnish media, there are only Finns here.

Yes, it's a big privilege to be here today. And I just have a few questions, but I have one clear one, a somewhat clear one. But given all these uncertainties that you have just mentioned with the new world order, as well as currently the NATO uncertainties around that, how would you envision...

And this is a big question, but the EU member states coming together and forming a military alliance, that is, yes, it's a big question, but... Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's a really good and relevant question. So I guess the big picture on this is to say that the basis of European security right now is the independent defence of Europe

states. In other words, what they have, what kind of militaries, what kind of systems, how much they spend, what their capabilities are.

The second base is the alliance, so NATO, 32 member states. And as we know, we are in a situation whereby the EU has 27 member states. Most of them are in NATO, but some are not. NATO has 32 member states. Most of them are in the EU. Some are not. So I've also – I've always been –

against the idea that there's kind of a binary choice between a European defence somehow separate from NATO because that just doesn't reflect reality in terms of operative capability, general capabilities and planning.

So the EU and NATO have two kind of separate roles. Right now we're seeing NATO sticking to the operations and the capabilities and the EU actually pumping up the finances, leveraging investment in defense expenditure, et cetera, et cetera. So what I'd probably like to see more is

a European pillar inside NATO. So that's my basic argument here. And for all the sort of mayhem around European security and American foreign policy, I am yet to hear from anyone serious inside the US administration. And I stress anyone serious.

in the US administration saying that they are somehow withdrawing from NATO. What President Trump is doing right now is correct. He's putting pressure on European states to increase their defence expenditure, increase these capabilities and take more responsibility for their own security.

As a Finn, having 1,340 kilometers of border with Russia, the more we spend around Europe, I think, the better. So, you know, again, let's not look at this as a black and white issue, the U.S. is leaving Europe, Europe will do it alone. No, it won't be either/or, it will probably end up being both. A final point on that, I think there is a misunderstanding about the U.S. balance in security in Europe.

it is very much focused on troops but really a hundred thousand troops including you know different types of military staff ranging from you know cooks to nurses to doctors

It's not the point. It's U.S. capability which is the point. And that's what we still need in Europe. But I think we are moving more towards a European pillar inside NATO, and it's good. And I'll just finish off with this as sort of, I guess, a personal anecdote linked to this question. You might know as a Finn that I was quite an avid advocate of Finnish NATO membership, and I took a lot of hit for it.

throughout my political career, which I stress you started only in 2004, but it really ended in 2016. I was out of politics in 2016. And one of the reasons was that I felt that I had not accomplished my lifelong mission of bringing Finland into NATO, and I had pretty much given up hope.

But then when the unfortunate thing happened that Putin and Russia attacked Ukraine, I sort of re-evaluated the situation, family included, and thought that given that we're going in, perhaps it's time to re-enter and try to have an impact.

And personally, I'm very happy about, well, not very happy, but I feel very good about the place in which Finland is right now in terms of being a security provider, not a security consumer, and being a part of an alliance where I think that we would have intellectually belonged ever since 1995.

thank you so i i have to say i cannot tell you how grateful we are that you took this when i think about the itinerary you're on so you know from seeing all the other world leaders to take the time out to come speak with us is something we're really really grateful for we really appreciate you taking the time it was also an incredibly interesting session we do have a small gift

to offer. And I emphasize small. I'm not going to say much more than that. Look at it later. And just everybody, before we offer final thanks to the speaker, I would ask that you all stay seated until the president has had an opportunity. I should have had this golfing. Thank you very much. We look forward to seeing pictures of it.

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