The Realignment: 410 | Thomas P.M. Barnett: How Globalization, North-South Migration, Climate Change, and Demographic Collapse Will Define America's New Map

Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment. Apologies for the lack of intro transition

and any other editing problems with this episode. Our producer, Phil Hagseth, just had his third

child, so he is obviously taking some well-deserved time off. A huge congrats to Phil and his wife,

but he will be sorely missed here. Today's guest, though, is Thomas P. M. Barnett, who has a new

book out, America's New Map, Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change

and Demographic Collapse. If you are a fan of last year's episode of Peter Zeihann on his

then-new book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning, this will be right up your alley.

In this episode, we cover all of the realignment's favorite topics, the ways that today's political

moment rhymes with the Gilded Age and the 1920s, the costs and benefits of globalization,

mass migration to the Northern Hemisphere, and a related reconceptualization of North-South as

being just as important as East-West, the coming demographic collapse and how it will affect the

U.S., China, and Europe, and of course a bit of discourse on climate change and the related

impact of all of the above to the U.S. defense position across the world. Thomas really immersed

as one of the country's leading geopolitical analysts after 9-11 with this Pentagon's New

Map trilogy, so it was a great opportunity to get an update on him on his perspective.

Hope you all enjoy this conversation. Thomas P. M. Barnett, welcome to the realignment.

Thanks for having me, Marshall. Yeah, it's great to chat with you as I pointed out before we started

recording. I've been reading your work since the 2000s high school era, so it's really exciting

to chat with you with the release of this new book. You really came to prominence with the

publication of an article in Esquire about the Pentagon's New Map in the wake of 9-11. You then

turned that into a three-part trilogy. Can you just kind of update everyone to introduce yourself?

What were you thinking? What were you looking at? Going into the 2000s, I had led a big project

for the Naval War College looking at Y2K, so I was really into complexity and the rise of all this

connectivity around the world and how interdependent we were becoming with the Chinese and the Indians

already then, especially on the whole remediation issue, so it was a real eye-opener. I then went

and led an effort with Canter Fitzgerald, the bond market-making firm that was headquartered

at World Trade Center One. We brought together a lot of senior officials from around the government,

a lot of senior business types, and we spoke about the future of globalization, what were going to be

the big structural issues, and what might constitute competition and even attack and violence

in a globalized era. What would that kind of conflict look like? Of course, the great irony

there was that project basically united the Pentagon and the World Trade Center or Wall

Street, and both were hit on 9-11, so career took a big jump then. I was pulled into the

Office of Secretary of Defense, into this new office of force transformation. They were trying

to figure out this future where they saw it as us fielding increasingly the many, the cheap, the

unmanned, and the disposable, and moving away from the whole platform thing, which is very

expensive, very vulnerable, heavily manned, and vulnerable, and we're seeing that play out now.

So I was in a really interesting place in the early 2000s to think about the future of warfare

and conflict, and I was asked by the Secretary of Defense to come up with a kind of a package

of looking at the world and helping us understand what the nature of the international structure

and the kind of conflict landscape would be coming out in 9-11, and I base that basically in

Pentagon's new map on this idea of, well, let me just show you where we've sent forces since the end

of the Cold War, and that's sort of our demand map. It shows where we get pulled all the time to do

these things, and we can either adjust to that or keep thinking in our mind that it's all about,

you know, Russia or China, when we're wearing ourselves down and running ourselves ragged,

going around the world, doing all this other stuff. So it became this kind of argument within the

military, hey, you're buying a big war force, but you mostly use a small war force, and when you do

that, it's hard and it hurts, and we went through the same corrections in Iraq and Afghanistan that

we went through a generation earlier, or 30, 40 years earlier in Vietnam, and we've kind of had

this sine wave of going back and forth between, hey, there's a world out there that's messy, that

we got to manage, that we want to manage because it's to our benefit and our strategic advantage,

or do we get focused solely on the big war construct, and that's gone back and forth.

We're now in the full swing of looking at the world in terms of great power conflict,

because Russia going into Ukraine, and then the fear that we're going to finally do this thing

with China over Taiwan, and yet I'm arguing in this book, much like I did back with the Pentagon's

new map, that we're really more in the world of security now than defense, and that we're really

shifting very dramatically thanks to climate change in a planet altering mode. We're switching

from a world that has been historically east-west in its dynamics to one that's going to be

north-south in its dynamics over this century, and so when I think about superpower conflict

and competition, I really think it has to do with which power addresses its version of its own

global south, geographically, for us, it's Latin America. I think whoever does that best

kind of wins the competition this century because there's going to be so much pressure

between climate change, which hits lower latitudes, tends to benefit upper latitudes,

demographic disparity, collapse in the north, which we're freaking out about more and more.

We got China on that pathway now, still fertile, still a youth bulge of about two billion souls

in the lower latitudes, and then finally this larger reality, which we haven't adjusted to

because it kind of gets at our ego to a certain extent, it certainly gets at the boomer ego,

this notion that the future of globalization in terms of middle-class consumption is going to be

inherently non-white, non-American, non-European, non-western, and for a part of the world that

has held itself as central to the whole global narrative for centuries, the notion of being kind

of displaced, replaced, marginalized, no longer in that central position, that's kind of challenging

for the western world right now. We have a lot of scary words that we apply to it, like chaos,

and G zero, and G this, G that, we're trying to figure it out, but it's also a larger expression,

the same thing going on inside the United States, where we're running this experiment

that's never been attempted in human history, basically across my lifetime, from 1950 to 2050,

the dominant racial group in America, whites, go from 90% to 45%, and that is an historical journey

that no major power has ever attempted, it would be like the Chinese going from 90% Han to 45% Han,

I mean it's inconceivable for them, less inconceivable for us, and this is a central argument in the

book, if we're looking at a century of North-South integration, this lifetime, and for the

lifetimes of our children and grandchildren, then my argument is the western hemisphere

is greatly advantaged for this, because in many ways we were premixed by half a millennia of

colonialization in the western hemisphere, where Europeans, Africans, Asians, mixing with Amarindians

to kind of a unique complexity, a unique diversity, a unique civilization and culture that I would

argue, that is worth defending and worth pursuing and worth taking advantage of, if these are the

structural changes that we're facing, all this North-South integration, which is going to be very

challenging, and it's going to be, as I like to say, the least racist superpower wins, because the

least racist superpower is the one most willing to adapt itself at high speed to this kind of

opportunity and this kind of challenge, and we should be thinking in those Darwinian terms,

if scientists tell us that the average species is being asked to evolve at roughly 10,000 times

its normal rate, well, I think enterprises, nation states, the system as a whole has to evolve rather

rapidly, and go back and read your Darwin, it's not the strongest guy who wins, it's the one most

willing to change, the most flexible, and I think we're in a good position, despite our internal

culture wars right now, to pursue that, because I think we're the most practiced at this kind of

assimilation and integration and the economic rule sets that can allow free trade to kind of

bring nations together in this process that we call globalization. I really think we're

tremendously advantaged, tremendously experienced, and this is our second century to grab.

Great summary, a lot of things I want to unpack there will kind of go one at a time over the

rest of the recording, so starting just with your experience with force transformation in the 2000s,

because this is my little obsession issue, so as you know during the 2000s, there's a humongous

debate about how, wow, it's the Iraq war, the Iraqi civil war is broken out, and you know,

American soldiers, Marines, airmen, etc. on the ground do not have body armor, we don't have the

proper MRAPs, we're constructing the wrong force for the wrong era, we need to not focus on great

power competition, we have to focus on the actual challenges on the ground. At the time though,

we make those adjustments, we surge, we focus on Afghanistan, we start putting great power

competition to the side, now the force transformation concern is, wait a second, we can't produce

artillery, our defense munitions base can completely throw apart, so asking you as a person who's

been in that world, is there actually a way to resolve this issue, because it seems like no

matter what you're always going to lose, because now you will explicitly see folks in the DOD say

things like, we got distracted from great power competition in the 2000s by focusing on the war

in Iraq, but at the end of the day, there was just no word we were going to say, look, we're

going to focus on the munitions base and not prioritize, so how do we actually resolve this

issue? Right, you know, it is tremendously hard, when you're the Leviathan in the system, as we

have seen ourselves, certainly since the end of the Cold War, you've got to cover the big strategic

war, so you've got to have all your nukes and all that high-end stuff, you've got to be able to handle

going into any country and dealing with major conflict inside that country, stabilization,

all that kind of stuff, and then you have to cover all the little stuff, like terrorism, insurgency,

stability operations, responding to environmental disasters or weather disasters, if you have to

do all that spread, you know, the argument I made way back when was that you should really bifurcate

your force, have one that's pretty much focused and preserved in terms of its usage to orient itself

around Great Power War and have one that is out there, you know, doing the dirty work on a day-to-day

basis, so that was my argument about the Leviathan force versus what I called the CIS admin force,

and that's tough to go between those two because, you know, the Pentagon wants an ordering principle

and like I described earlier, we've had this sineway throughout history where it's all about

small wars, no, no, no, it's all about big wars, no, no, no, it's all about small wars,

and we go back and forth and because we really are split in terms of the forces, you know,

the small war force is green, army, marines, soft, and the big war force, the super platform

force really is blue, air force, navy, increasingly space, and so there's a fight for resources

and that's not going to go away just because, you know, of the indebtedness that our country has

and the aging that's going on in our society, so all the things that are built into our budget

that we can't walk away from as we get older as a demographic, so the argument we made way back when

and I think is actually coming true now, the office of force transformation argument was that

hey, let's go unmanned, let's beat them with just tons of stuff, let's make it disposable so we don't

have to worry about blood in addition to treasure, so let's have robot wars and drone wars and just

make their lives miserable, anybody trying to make any mischief and on that basis kind of do

a 21st century Reagan doctrine, you know, we're not there to fix everything but we are there to

prevent bad things from happening and to deal with other great powers that are stepping over the line

and that gets you into this porcupine kind of approach with Ukraine, you know, it harkens back

to Roosevelt's arsenal of democracy, I think it works with Taiwan and I think there's a way for us

to kind of play that role, be the big supplier, be more about denial and less about trying to prevail

in these conflicts, I mean we don't have to prevail over China in some sort of direct war

over Taiwan, we just have to make Taiwan such an unswallowable porcupine that it's creating so much

uncertainty on the Chinese side that they're just not willing to risk it, I think that's all doable,

I really do, but you are not going to have any more Gerald R. Ford's at 13, you know, billion

dollar ship or the aircraft carrier than you mean, yeah, the aircraft carrier or these other ones,

I thought you meant the president for I was like, no, no, no, I like to refer, I was just at his

museum this summer, because you saw what happened in the Black Sea with the Moskva, you know, this

is a major capital ship of the Russians, it was taken down with about 400 grand worth of surface

missiles, you know, and you're going to see that more and more, you're going to see very expensive

things taken down at very low cost and because, you know, the rest of the world, the asymmetrical

world that's going to deal with great powers doing their stuff, and we got great powers doing their

stuff all over the place, we got the Russians, we got the Chinese, we got the Indians kind of

waking up, we got the EU doing its integration eastward, everybody's out there doing stuff,

much more so than the United States, I would argue, we've been in a funk for about a decade

in terms of interaction with the outside world, and it's starting to show and cost us, but you

know, all the asymmetrical players out there dealing with these large powers, they're all

going to reach for this, you know, the Iran's of the world are not going to try to beat you with

tanks, they're going to try to beat you with drones, they're going to try to beat you with

cyber, and so all this stuff is kind of moving to this larger definition of security, less about

defense, more about security, and I argue that's the real playing field, you know, we ran this

experiment in the west of having a middle class emerge, and we got fascism from the right, and

we got communism from the left as reactions, okay, we're rerunning that experiment now globally,

and it's largely centered in the global south, okay, and that's why you see all this news nowadays,

you know, who's winning the global south, who's convincing the global south, why can't we get

the global south to care about Ukraine, and all these things, we're starting to wake up

to this reality that, you know, with the huge demographic dividend that this global south is

processing now, not only are they the logical source of cheap labor in the global system,

not only are they logically slotted in in lower production chains to a to a rising

India and a risen China and whatnot, but that's where you're going to get lots of growth in

terms of consumption, and if you think about this, you know, I want to control the kind of

consumption we're going to have in the future, I need it to be a lot more, let's say resource

preserving or less resource wasteful, because if I had a middle class in 1950 that was only a

quarter of the world, and now I got one in 2050, that's more like 65, 70% of the world,

I can't use resources with that 70%, like I did back when it was just the teeny tiny west,

there's not enough planets for that. So I mean, all these things kind of come together in terms of

resource utilization, adapting to climate change, exploiting the future growth engine

in the global economy, and all these things kind of say, you know, who's going to integrate best,

who's going to have the best looking brand, because these people, you know, having lived in

poverty, often for centuries or millennia, they move into consumption now, they're leaving a world

behind that was unbranded, unpackaged, unprocessed, okay, now they're moving into a universal consumption

that is branded and processed and packaged, and we know full well from when you buy your first car

as a young adult, or the first time you vote for president, you tend to stick with those choices,

they're very powerful linkages there, forged, and we're looking at, you know, half a humanity

kind of coming online in that consumption world, and what they really want is less about, you know,

country A versus country B in classic defense, what they want is security,

they want protection for their achievements, for their assets, they want protection from the future,

that's what the middle class wants, they got a good life, they want to preserve it,

they want to extend it, and they want to give it to their kids slightly better than it was given

to them, or achieved by them, and I think that's the real push, and that's where a lot of what is

going to constitute great power or superpower competition, and success, and who's going to

dominate, and whose rules are going to dominate, and whose vision of global structure is going to

dominate, is going to be the superpower that makes that integration southward happen in the most

profound way, and I think there are examples out there, the EU with state accession, which I think

is brilliant, and it's done amazing things, and then you got the Chinese with the Belt and Road,

which I would argue, there's my sys admin force from 20 years ago, my system administrative

force, what are they all about? Connectivity, security, getting people boots on the ground,

meshing your reality with theirs, and I would argue with the social control technologies they

package on top of Belt and Road, they are integrating the planet a lot more than we realize, you know,

we look at the world in terms of poker, we think it's all about, you know, how we're going to win

that pot in Ukraine, how we're going to up the ante this round, same kind of bluff, you know,

how bad do you want Taiwan kind of relationship showdown with the Chinese, I say the Chinese are

playing a global go board, you know, if you know anything about the old Chinese game of go, they're

not interested, you know, in anything but laying down stones, connecting them together, supply chains,

resource chains, surveillance chains, and they're all about kind of conquering the world one little

safe zone at a time, they're building an environment they feel comfortable with, whereas our tendency

is just to come in and kill bad guys and lead, and those two things are kind of meeting all over

the place, you know, they're doing very intelligent things, and they're out playing us, and I don't

think we view the game the way we should in large part because our boomer leadership, you know, what

do they know? They know containment, they know Cold War, they know buy big platforms to scare the

hell out of your enemy, they know load up on nuclear weapons, they know, you know, rapid fire, all in

kind of war mentality, which is what we lived with for decades under the Cold War, this whole notion

that we would light up the planet in five minutes, you know, if we had to, and we're really past that

world, I would argue in many ways, and we're not seeing the world clearly for what it is.

You know, I want to get to the big topic, and obviously the book deals with, I think my

definition of your work was, we're focused on like three big dynamics, so one is just globalization,

two is climate change, and three is demographic collapse, climate change and demographic collapse

come out of globalization's pluses and minuses. So I want to kind of like start there with

globalization on two levels, we're in a really interesting perspective on the globalization

narrative. I will go through them with you one at a time, the first one would just be practical,

I want to know your thoughts on this. So on a practical level, what are you talking about,

Thomas, you know, we have deglobalization, we see regionalization, supply chain risks,

the world of the 2000s, you're giving me Thomas Friedman, you know, flashbacks of all this.

So can you kind of respond to like the, and then we'll get to the narrative side of it,

because I love your work on storytelling. We'll spend a lot of time there, but let's just start

on the practical level. What is your defense of why globalization is still a useful framework for

approaching the world? Oh, absolutely. You know, we had this strategy of encouraging

peacefully rising powers. And you know, and at first it was just the West, we called it the

free world. And then we attracted the emulation of the Chinese based on what they saw going on

with the Asian Tigers and Japan, and their rise and the sort of strategy of enablement

that the United States engaged in. And in one of my books, I called this the transaction strategy,

basically, hey, we'll open up, we'll let you export, drive your growth, and we'll absorb

your exports. We'll be very open in that way. That's what we did for the Japanese,

the Asian Tigers, ultimately for China. And we said, you know, the implicit transaction here is

you take your trade surplus, you plow it back into our debt markets, that allows us to have the big

force, to overspend, to have the big force, have a good standard of living, and we'll provide the

glue in your part of the world security wise to create this reality, which if you think about

it is absolutely amazing. Never in human history have we had a big, powerful India, China, Korea,

Japan at the same time, with not, you know, no war kind of disabling them. You know, that was

an amazing achievement. And that took what was a global economy that was just the West, and turned

it into a majority global economy. And that's when we started calling it the global economy in the

1980s, and then we started calling it globalization. Then we got kind of wrapped around the axle during

peak globalization with this notion that, you know, it was sort of like we had to send everything to

the other side of the world, and it had to come all the way back from the other side of the world,

and anything short of that kind of long journey in terms of production chains, you know, if you

didn't maintain that, then you were de-globalizing. Okay, and it was an artificial reality that

reflected China's demographic dividend being played out in the 1990s and 2000s. The wage

differential there was so attractive, and the transportation costs were so low, that it did

kind of make sense to kind of send everything to China, have them assemble, manufacture, and then

send it all the way back. Okay, China has reached the point, so has Asia in general,

where they now consume, thanks to their own expanding middle class, they now consume most of

what they create. And so they become their own demand consumption production hub, you know,

to join the EU and to join, quite frankly, a laggard United States. So we're not as trade

integrated in the Northern American triad of us, Canada, and Mexico, despite NAFTA and USMCA,

we're at like 40% trade integration in North America. Asia is like at 50%, Europe's more

like at 70%. Okay, so we're kind of behind the scope here, and we look at China having risen,

and then we say, wow, one, they didn't Americanize, so what's up with that? I mean,

we traded with them, we gave them McDonald's, we had the same argument with the Russians,

and yet they refused to be anything other than Chinese. Okay, so they haven't Americanized,

which we find highly suspicious, because we think to join globalization is to Americanize

yourself. That's our ego talking. And by Americanize, you really mean liberal democracy.

Right, right, right. And when they don't, you know, we find it suspicious and threatening,

and which is a little unrealistic to expect 5,000 years of Chinese history to flip on a dime like

that. But then we also can I pause you there, just to defend the unmentioned people who felt

this unrealistic. I mean, look, like, to your point about, I love this point in your book,

you point out that globalization is a response to a disastrous first half of the 20th century.

The process is just described. And in that process, you know, maybe it's ambitious to assume

you're going to transform 5,000 years of Chinese history, but through globalization,

you get a peaceful Germany and a peaceful Japan. So I do think it is, I think it is worthy to note

that if it's the 1990s, I don't think it's unrealistic to, let's say, overestimate the

abilities of trade, commerce, international agreements, et cetera, to kind of resolve things.

I just want to kind of like note that, but please keep going too.

Well, and, you know, the reason why I call it the Pentagon's new map is that, you know,

there's a there's a velocity to globalization hitting your traditional society and the higher

that velocity, the more destabilizing it is. Okay. So with the tremendous force of integration

happening, yeah, you're going to get friction galore. Okay. But then I will look at it and still

say, Hey, there's no system level war. There's no World War three. We constantly declare it and say,

well, it's really kind of World War three and cyber or it's kind of World War three in terms

of arms racing. You're like, no, that's not kind of World War three. World War two was 20,000 deaths

a day for 10 years. That was a real war. And we got nothing like that. So I do believe in the

ultimately pacifying effect of this, but back to the story, you know, when China rises, they didn't

rise to slot themselves in under us. And our American global rule set, they rose because

they have ambitions to make their own rules and their own patterns come about. They want to secure

their future as much as we want to secure our future. And they still feel like we have structural

advantages. You know, the dollar is the reserve currency, world's biggest military, that kind of

stuff. So you get to the Great Recession. We've run this transaction strategy with the Chinese as

far as they can go. We're over leveraged and the Chinese have risen and now they're consuming and

their middle class is emerging. And now you're starting to see this reshoring, re-regionalizing.

And what does that reflect? It reflects the fact that it no longer makes sense to send everything

to Asia for assembly and bring it all the way back. Now is that the end of globalization?

Okay. Well, it's the flatlining of goods-centric globalization,

the movement of stuff. Okay. And it does flatline foreign direct investment to a certain extent,

because that is typically attached to physical goods, factories, you own stuff in other parts

of the world. But what happens at the same time that the deglobalizers just don't pay any attention

to, and it's a key attribute of this book, this exploration, is that the digitalization of globalization

goes through the roof in the same timeframe. That global data flows increase 50 bold, roughly

around the decade surrounding the Great Recession. So while everything is slowing down and de-globalizing

in goods trade, the digital aspect through the roof, so much so that McKenzie Global Institute

now estimates that the majority of value of goods traded globally is based in a digital format.

And this is hard for people to understand. It doesn't seem real. The weekend puts out a song,

it gets downloaded four billion times through Spotify. How is that commerce? Well, money's

changing hands. And even more so interesting to me, identities are being fractured and formed and

reformed on a global basis, so much so that we're in a period of history right now with younger

generations, especially millennials, Gen Zs, Gen Alphas, where their definition of identity as an

American or as a citizen, their sense of patriotism, their sense of nationality, citizenship is just

one of many identities out there that can be claimed. And that we're really kind of fighting

the Chinese and others to see who is going to be best at kind of protecting and preserving

people's ability to have those identities and to attract subscribers sort of to our national brand

versus China's, because what right now China is doing in this world is actually trying to commoditize

connectivity, commoditize freedom and security and growth and saying, you know what, our version

of giving you that is just as good as the democracies in the West. In fact, it's better,

because these people fight over crazy stuff and they're very erratic and they're not trustworthy,

and we're the Chinese, you know, we may be kind of slow, we may be kind of rigid, but we're there

and we'll be there and we'll continue to be there. And right now that package, when you're a developing

economy, you want to hook up to 5G, you're worried about controlling your society, they come in,

they're building infrastructure, they're helping you with social control technologies,

they're safe city offering, Huawei, hike vision, you know, they come in and they kind of layer

your urban environment with all this surveillance capacity. And it really does say very positive

things to governments that are very nervous about being left behind in the digital world.

And so they're beating us on attraction, especially, you know, like when we're all about denial,

you know, you can't have this conductor, the semiconductor, you can't have this

bit of technology, the Chinese come in and say, no, you can, we just want back doors built in.

I think that that was a great answer on the practical side of globalization. I want you to

respond then to the narrative side of it. I'd say the narrative about globalization, especially in

the kind of circles that this podcast tends to run in is globalization at a narrative level was

a false promise, especially the 1990s insert end of history cliche. It's really this story that

deindustrialized the economy, sorry, deindustrialized the middle of the country left us vulnerable

to supply chain weakness issues and then also really fueled inequality because the idea that

we could transition into a financial services oriented economy versus an industrialized economy

didn't play out the way it needed to play out. How do you respond to kind of like the narrative

arguments from a storytelling perspective about what the globalization narrative did to

policymakers, our understandings of these issues, etc. Sure. I mean, to join globalization is

basically to exploit or cash in a demographic dividend when you have lots of workers relative

to dependents. And so you become the sexy new thing in the global economy. You're the cheap labor

that all your competitors hate, but that's how you get in. Okay, then you're integrated into

global value chains. And the reality for the more advanced economies is, you know, you can't sit there

and make steel forever in that economy and hope that's going to be the basis of how you do things.

You got to move up the production ladder, you got to get more technologically intensive,

you got to get more IP oriented. And that does create inequality in your society. It does

it does redefine a middle class in America, which is on average about two and a half times the per

capita spending capacity of this global middle class that's emerging. Okay, so it is challenging

in that regard. I mean, we should not be educating ourselves and our children the way we learned or

decided to put it together in the industrial age 120 years ago. Okay. And so there are changes

and adjustments we need to make. And it flows with the larger argument I make in the book about

what we sought to do. We sought to end world wars. Okay, so this is our open door going back to

Teddy Roosevelt, open door. Okay, how did we get so powerful in America? We took what was ultimately

50 states and had frighteningly free trade among them. Financial flows inside America are completely

unregulated. We don't track, you know, New York's foreign direct investment in Florida.

You know, we don't track those things. If we track that stuff inside America, our numbers would be

off the chart. We are like the purest form of globalization. Okay, we are really free in terms

of movement of money, movement of people, movement of goods, movement of assets of production. Okay,

we introduced that rule set around the world thinking that would stop the future of world wars

and we succeeded. Okay, and what we wanted ultimately were a bunch of other peacefully risen powers.

And we got them now. Okay, that means the competition is altered, dramatically altered.

And if you thought globalization had to ensure America's preeminence, that that was what it was

all about. And if it didn't do that or replicate the world in our image and turn everybody into

Americans overnight, then I think that side was the naive side. Okay, because I look at those

risen powers and I say now, hey, it's a it's a it's a much more even competition about whose rules,

whose integration schemes, whose norms, whose international institutions are going to prevail.

And I much prefer to see us compete viciously if necessary with the Chinese, the Europeans,

the Russians and the Indians this century. Those are the five big powers I concentrate on in the

book. I much rather have us fight it out in cyberspace and in financial networks and everywhere

else versus this kind of gut instinct that we have for always declaring or anticipating or

declaring inevitable World War Three. I mean, I live in Ohio now. Whenever I come to Washington,

all I hear is we're going to war with China. Every room I walk into, we're going to war with China.

It's inevitable. We can't stop it. We got to get ready for it. We got to position for it.

You leave the belt line. No one's talking about this. Okay, that's not the world they're seeing.

That's not the world they fear. That's not the world they're trying to manage. We have a huge

disconnect and it's not just Washington versus the rest. It's the generation. You know, boomers

still run the country in Congress and the federal government and they got a mindset when they see

a China, they see one sort of challenge. Conveniently, we got Taiwan to still fight over and that's

what they want to respond to and they want to throw containment and they want to throw embargoes and

they want to throw sanctions at it. You know, our view of the world is you're in a defense

agreement with America or we're sanctioning you all the time pretty much. You overlay those two

maps and that's the world. You're either with us or again, that's how we play it. But the rest of

the world is offering something different. The Chinese, the Indians, even the Russians,

certainly the Europeans, they're offering a sense of strategic belonging, you know, state accession,

infrastructure connectivity, that kind of stuff. It's all based on kind of extending themselves

to other parts of the world where the United States, we're arguing about how big the wall

should be and how many weapons and under what conditions we go to war with China. It's like

we're living in the 1960s or 50s, you know, even to the point where the boomers are trying to weaponize

nostalgia, you know, we're making America great again. We want to return to the 1950s and madmen

era and all that kind of stuff. None of that's reclaimable. None of that's recoverable. It's

a retreat into fantasy, but you know, that's what aging leadership generations tend to do.

They're very dangerous. And I think we're at a really negative point now where we can't understand

the globalization narrative because of the nature of the leadership we have and their inability to

imagine beyond. I don't think that's a problem with Gen Z's, Gen Alpha. As they come on, I certainly

don't see it in the millennials. But in terms of Gen X and the boomers, I think we're saddled

right now with very weak political generations. I mean, I think its leadership in the political

realm now is as bad as it was, say in the 1920s or say in the 1880s. I mean, just nobody with any

talent goes into politics right now. They go into business and technology. And it's starting to show

because the gap between what we're doing with business and technology and what the

politicians see is vast. I mean, the business world is saying, hey, it's all about environment,

climate change. It's all about social stuff. I'll throw in demographics there. It's all about

governance. I would say who wins the allegiance of a global middle class. I think their instincts on

ESG are actually dead straight. I want them to anticipate that sort of change. I want them to

have that sort of evolutionary ambition. And yet we got our politicians telling them, hey,

that's too woke or that's too this or that's too that. I mean, I don't want them buying the curve

in terms of global economic developments. I want my corporations out there being bold, being daring,

doing stuff, making connectivity happen in competition with the Chinese. So when I look at

Belt and Road all over Latin America, and then I see a headline, Amazon just ain't to deal with

El Salvador to run its cloud services for all its government stuff for the next seven years,

I'm saying that is victory. That is progress. Not trying to stop the Chinese from semiconductor

building and that kind of stuff. Okay, so so many things I want to respond to. So number one,

I'm concerned about the story you're telling about business leaders, because I will agree with you

upfront at a pure quality level. The people who I see, no offense, I know you're listening,

who are attracted to politics are not the same level of talent that I'm encountering when I'm

interviewing tech founders, CEO types at an age cohort level. Once again, that's not to say that

tech founders are perfect, but there's just clearly a difference there. If it's the new due era,

a different sort of person is attracted to politics versus someone who's not, etc. etc. I would say

though, I'm concerned about your lauding of the corporate instincts on a lot of these big issues,

because one of the hallmarks of the globalization era has been the separation of the corporate

market bottom line from the national interest. So when you say, you know, someone in a corporation

and someone on Wall Street, they are assessing a more peaceful, more stable approach towards China,

that could be 100% true. I can 100% trust that and believe that. But in the back of my mind,

I have to say to myself, yeah, but also the world where China isn't a threat,

where the Taiwan thing is entirely fank, it is just nothing but hawks like me,

blowing smoke up everyone's butt. There's a financial incentive to say that. So can you

just kind of respond to how we should think about the corporate instinct there?

I mean, I learned this from Kenneth Fitzgerald back when I was doing the work on globalization

prior to 9-11, the terrorist strike. You know, Kenneth Fitzgerald is a bond market maker.

They run the market. They want good transactions. They want good connectivity between buyers and

sellers. They take a tiny bit off the top of each transaction. So they're not players in the system,

they're market makers. Key distinction. In our world, America, throughout the Cold War and

since the end of the Cold War, has had this market making mindset. We're not just trying to win

competitions with other powers. We're trying to make the system work and we're trying to preserve

the system. And I would argue that made sense right up through the Great Recession. Now I would say

the system is strong enough that what we need to do is concentrate more on market playing, less on

market making. I think the market out there is strong. I don't see the Chinese and the Russians

trying to break that system. I see them trying to play within it to their advantages. I believe

we need to shift to more of that. And I agree. I would like in that process for our national

flagship companies, you know, one, I don't want them demonized. I don't want them treated like

the enemy. I think that's bad because the Chinese certainly don't do that with Hyke Vision and Huawei

and all their national flagships. You know, so I want to move away from that. And I do want to

see more cooperation between the business world and the political world. I want to see, you know,

I don't want to call it an industrial policy, but I do want to see a coherent mindset between

the two, a common operational picture, which is what I'm trying to get in this book. This notion,

you know, I think the real competition going forward is not us trying to out-integrate China

in Asia. Who's Aaron? I don't think we're going to out-integrate the EU in Europe. I don't think

we're going to out-integrate the major regional kingpin players that are all over the Middle

East right now, Chinese, Indians, Turks, Russians, Iranians, Israelis, Saudis, Emiratis. I think

there's too many players there. I don't think we're going to out-integrate India, the Persian Gulf

monarchies and China and Sub-Saharan Africa. I think the one place where we can out-integrate

everybody is the Western Hemisphere. And it's ripe for integration. And if you're worried about

water, you're worried about energy access, you're worried about food access amidst all this climate

change, hell, the package we got in the Western Hemisphere in terms of our ability to integrate,

it's a much simpler process in our neck of the woods than say Europe with Africa. Our religious

diversity is much less. Our language diversity is much less. You know, we're a very peaceful part

of the world. We have advantages and resources. All these things are there. Okay. And I think they

speak to business and government not looking at each other and not spending so much time,

you know, kind of relitigating peak globalization and what happened to the American middle class

on that basis. Because honestly, when I talk to organizations and groups now, and I say, hey,

you know, you're not going to go back and recover the 1950s, never going to happen.

I mean, it's a nice dream, but frankly, it's sort of like the ghost dance. I mean, it's fantastic.

It's it's the magic bomb or whatever, like some have been laden. If we can only just achieve

some magical thing, we'll go back there. Okay, I think it leads you down fantastic paths. I think

you have to adjust the reality that we're facing. When I talk to groups, you know,

Gen Z's millennials will tell you that their reality as they look for it, going forward,

is already in that global middle class with its diminished amount of consumption. Okay,

that they can't possibly replicate what Gen X and Gen and the boomers have lived because it was

wasteful, because it was self centered, because it was over leveraged, all these things are coming

a crop or now. And so I don't think I have to really convince tomorrow's American middle class

of accepting this reality, because I think in many instances, they've already taken the haircut

in terms of expectations, you know, it's like millennials can't buy a house, that kind of

stuff. It's very different world. And I think they're willing to engage that world now on this basis.

And we can kind of move past these, you know, you lie to us, you know, Americans are like a

three year old in preschool, you know, we can't change tasks, or we can't leave one activity,

go to another one without kind of demonizing the past activity. So if globalization and

integration and all that stuff worked magically through 2008, then and then got tougher, and got

weirder and more confrontational for us in terms of our efforts vis-a-vis other powers, we can't

just say, Hey, you know, it was good while it lasted. Now we got this new situation to deal with.

Instead, we have to say, Hey, the past was all a lie. We were tricked. We were duped. We took our

eye off the ball with China. We have to kind of work ourselves into this lather that I don't think

is very strategic at all and really waste a lot of time and opportunity. So I try to

deal with those competing globalization narratives. And then I'm really, I'll be honest,

you know, in this book, I don't spend a lot of time trying to convince gen Xers or boomers about

anything. I'm really talking to Gen Z. I'm talking to the millennials. They're going to be running

this world mid century. They already feel these global dynamics and they're ready to move on.

It's just that we're still ruled by boomers who want it all to be about, you know, World War

III. I mean, you got to watch it today. They declare World War like every 45 minutes.

I can't. I want to throw a quote of yours at you, not in a negative way, because I think it gets

to what you're saying here. You're talking about storytelling and you say, quote, my task here

is to propose a happy ending. Right. And we can, you know, as a millennial, like I can dump

on baby boomer nostalgia politics. There's a Biden version of that. There's a Trump version of that.

That said, I understand them as actually practicable, because it's a concrete straightforward

story, right? Like the left wing version is, hey, back in the 1950s, government did X, Y, and Z.

Corporations were aligned with the national interests, GM's, you know, in the national

interest, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, union membership is high, tax rates are 90%,

buddy, buddy, buddy, but I get where that story works. I also get why the right wing story works.

For social nation, picket fence, straightforwardness, high religiosity, social structure,

basically 60s didn't happen. If you're going to say that this is just baby boomer nostalgia,

which it definitely is, there has to actually be a convincing story that's alternate and is happy.

And what I have not seen from millennials, Gen Z or Alpha is an alternate story that could win a 60

to 66% of the country's allegiance, because the funny thing too, and you kind of see this with

millennials who are like eight years older than we have taken power, they kind of take

power by making the baby boomers happy, right? So like Pete Buttigieg, you know, bless him,

he's every baby boomer's dream son or grandson. So to a certain degree, his incentive is not to do

that. Same thing with Obama too. So what is a version of a story that you think Gen Z, Gen Alpha,

millennials like me and my cohort, what should we be telling? Sure, sure. I mean, to me, the boomer

story right now is absolutely bankrupt. Let's go back to what we had coming out of World War II.

You know, when we were industrially and demographically unharmed by a war that devastated

everybody else, devastated them. Okay, can we go back to that reality? No way, without like triggering

World War III and decimating everybody all over again. It's a completely unsustainable past.

And I, you know, I'm sorry it got built into our national psyche as the golden age,

but it was completely artificial. And my argument is, you know, the greatest thing any country ever did

was America at the height of that power concentration decided to spread it and got us to this point,

reducing global poverty, raising global wealth, creating for the first time in history something

everybody throughout my childhood and adolescence said would never happen, which is a majority

global middle class. That is greatness. Okay, it's also so great that we altered the planet doing it,

and we triggered a new geological age by our mastery and our influence over the planet,

which is why I say in the book, you know, our identity as Americans, whether we're individuals

or collective, that's the most important identity any of us have, because of our impact on the planet.

Okay, so I try to get you to understand the unsustainability of going back. Okay,

I try to get you to understand that a lot of our fears right now are the fact that whites in America

are on this downward course in terms of centrality, demographically, and it scares the hell out of

Robert Pate, the guy from University of Chicago studied the 377 arrested and put on trial or

whatever coming out of the January 6 insurrection. The one factor he thought he found statistically

was that they came overwhelmingly from counties where the white share of the population

was declining precipitously. The angst underlying that racial makeover is driving a lot of these

culture wars, which makes it seem like we're just reliving, relitigating the 1960s and early 1970s,

right down going back and redoing Roe v. Wade and all these things.

Civil rights, we're fighting these these battles from the boomers that have been extended all the

way to now. Okay, and when the younger generations look at this, you know, they just don't see themselves

in this future. They, you know, they're already, they're globalization natives, they're digital

natives, they're post-white majority America natives, all these things they've been living

with throughout their lives. They don't have to call it woke or non woke or these other labels

that the boomers want to fight over. They're into this reality. They need somebody, though,

to articulate where that reality can be exploited to America's advantage in a way that they don't

feel is colonial or going backwards in terms of replicating or perpetuating inequalities.

And the argument we make in this book is, hey, this is North-South integration.

This gives us a chance to redefine the American Union, to open it back up for membership,

to deal with all this climate change and demographic pressures, immigration, everything

that we're feeling now in a positive way, not armed people at the border. Because I mean,

we're looking at that future now. The Saudis killing hundreds of Ethiopian migrants coming over

from Yemen. The Italian Coast Guard turning a blind eye to a ship going down the med with hundreds

of climate migrants. I mean, we're looking at the future and it's nasty. It's killing

coming over the border. And we have people trying to declare or establish their bona fides as tough

on immigration, you know, promising all sorts of violence, systemic violence by our military

forces against Mexico to deal with these kinds of problems. All this kind of stuff is going nowhere

on the boomer side. Millennials, Gen Zs, Gen Alpha need a positive story. Okay. And I'm arguing it's

about extending membership. It's about opening America back up. It's about choosing country

over color. It's about America 2.0. It's about building something bigger that encompasses our

entire neighborhood. And you can go back and check out the founding fathers. They were all

interested in making the Americas kind of safe for a big America. They weren't just thinking

about Westward expansion. They thought this was the refuge, the new world from all the colonial

imperial things that were going on around the world. And I would argue, you know, after 500 years of

racial intermixing in the Western Hemisphere, sort of like humanity and war of the worlds,

we have earned the right to be good at globalization. So if you're telling me North

South integration is going to be where it's at, I'm telling you, we got to path forward. This is a

way to heal our nation by increasing our nation. And that has been an instinct we've had throughout

our history. We added 37 states over 17 decades, a new state every three to four years, because our

argument was, no matter what's going on inside this country, when we get bigger, we get better.

And the Europeans have been following that advice for the last four or five decades in Europe,

and they have gotten bigger and they have gotten better. And we're seeing the Chinese and the

Russians do their version of that sort of expansionism, more old school, you know, kind of pushing

your way in or taking hostages like the Russians. But we got a model here that's built for this sort

of redefinition. You know, if it's all about North South intermixing, we got a model that says

anybody can be an American. Okay, any country can join America. We've joined with, you know,

monarchies, we bought chunks of our country over the world, you know, over our history. We've done

westward expansion, we've done like every sort of expansion out there. I'm saying what the Europeans

offer as an example right now is something we can adopt. And when you get out there and say, hey,

you know, El Salvador, or Costa Rica, this future I know doesn't scream, I'm going to be fine on my

own, if I'm those countries. In fact, it screams just the opposite. It screams, pull your sovereignty,

pull your risk, get bigger, get better. Because if I'm just El Salvador trying to navigate

this zone of turbulence caused by all this demographic disparity by climate change,

I may not exist on the far side of this process. In fact, there's a very good chance it won't exist.

Something I'd so quick thing I wanted to note to prove I actually I read the book, you do something

very interesting, which is in the book you refer to these United States, as opposed to the United

States, the these United States was a and this is nothing to a slavery. But these United States was

typically the way that you refer to the United States before the Civil War. And then after the

Civil War, where our definition of states rights and the conception of the states route to the

union change we started referring to the United States. But it's kind of funny how you're saying

these United States is a way of like expanding the over to window for how we should consider

other states. But I guess the thing that really confuses me here, and it's your platform, it's

not even trying to have an argument here is I struggle with your optimism about the lessons

for the year from the European project, given everything that's happened post financial crisis.

So for example, huge issue post financial crisis. It's not merely that you had a EU and the debates

about nationalism and, you know, Brexit and frexit and all the different, you know, exit,

you know, references we can make it's also the fact that a huge controversy was the EU,

let poor countries or struggling or unreformed countries like Greece into the EU. So you had a

massive controversy after the financial crisis. And it seems to me that letting countries like

El Salvador, letting countries like in Central America into the American Union at a state

conceptual level would just replicate the problems you had in the EU in the 2010s,

but at even deeper level, because it's not as if you're saying, oh, like we're all part of the

hemispheric union, the H you like the EU, you're actually saying, no, it's not just that you're

part of this broader supernational membership organization. You're actually arguing that that

El Salvadoran is now an American, because you weren't arguing that a Greek was a German, you're

just saying you're part of a broader union. So why aren't you supporting a hemispheric union and

integrating that way? As opposed to saying, no, we're going to actually make the United States

a cross hemispheric polity. I'm just curious why you draw that distinction. Right, right, right.

And that's why I go back to these United States. I mean, we're well over 600 legal identities,

you know, 574 sovereign Native American nations inside the United States, 50 member states,

14 territories, and a federal district. We have tiered citizenship now.

We have tiered membership now. We could have a tiered membership that allows an El Salvador

to connect on some level. And the Europeans give us interesting examples. I mean, we could have a

money union, a currency union, we could have a trade union. I mean, what we typically offer is just

defense union. You don't offer the rest of it. I mean, if free trade area, the Americas had taken

off, you know, in the mid 1990s under Clinton, we'd be in a different world right now. But we

got the Chinese moving in. Now they're the biggest supplier of foreign direct investment

around Latin America. They're the biggest trade partner for everybody except Mexico,

where we are the biggest trade partner. The Europeans are eager to make Mercosur

a special connection to the EU. I just think we got to wake up to the reality that, you know,

it's not just, are we going to accept a redefinition of the American Union? The alternate is to accept

basically the eradication of the Monroe Doctrine sense of propriety that we've had towards our

hemisphere. And I think, you know, it's not hard to imagine China taking resources like food

out of South America while there's enough disaster going on environmentally that there are

famines and crises and instabilities there that end up being our problem. Okay. I mean, right now,

the Chinese take a lot of food out of Ethiopia. They have long term leases and some of the best

farmland there. Ethiopia is in the eighth year of a mega drought. It's suffering some civil war in

the north. There are people leaving the land because they can't live there. It's not sustainable.

It's not food secure. And so they're going up, trying to go through the Persian Gulf and they're

being murdered by Saudi security forces. Meanwhile, the Chinese are taking out resources, taking out

food. They can replicate that model throughout Latin America, creating all sorts of huge risks

for us hemispherically that they don't have to deal with. So I don't offer this as just a good

possibility or a positive thing or some sort of jingoistic

resurrection of manifest destiny or something like that. I'm also telling you, this is a defense

of grand strategy. And I say that in the book, you know, we are looking at North-South integration

on a grand scale forced by vast environmental forces that we have unleashed with globalization.

And if we adjust ourselves to it, there's a path forward that sees us thrive and expand and come

out of this, you know, several decades zone of turbulence, that's where we're going to experience

before climate change kind of settles down by most predictions later this century. I don't

think you're going to be able to get through this process without evolving. We're seeing that

throughout nature, you know, adapt, move or die. We're seeing all three happening throughout

nature. I think the same thing is going to happen with nation-states. I'd prefer not to die or, you

know, disappear in a cloud of culture wars or eastern Washington or eastern Oregon breaking off

and forming the free state of Jefferson or whatever with the... I'm from Oregon, that's a deep cut

reference. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's the alternative now. This is very much like, you know,

Teddy Roosevelt back when it was the closing of the American frontier, that argument for

Frederick Jackson Turner, you know, he had this environmental fear where he said, you know,

if we are penned in as a nation, we're going to turn on each other and we have to be able to

extend ourselves. And that became the argument for open door. It became an argument for a certain

jingoistic catch-up strategy on colonialization. You know, we're going to grab our bits before

it all went down and take on the weakest link out there, the Spanish empire. I think there are

frontiers that we can not conquer but integrate and help settle. And if you think of the global

economy as parts that are well integrated in global value chains and parts that are left on

the fringes, I think the low level of trade integration in Latin America and between Latin

America and North America, that is right for all sorts of good things to happen, all sorts of profit,

engine to be created there. But it's going to require more than us just waging our fingers at

them and saying, hey, liberalized, democratized, marketized, connect up with the outside world.

Those are tough things to do unless you're going to extend some sort of give with that huge ask.

I would say the Europeans do extend that give, which is do all these changes,

Europeanize your legal system, and we'll let you in. Do they do it because they're going to

make money in the short term? No. They do it because they believe in bulking up long-term,

which I agree with. I think the biggest markets determine globalization going forward. And I

think we're at great risk of becoming a small market relative to the Chinese and the Indians

and the Europeans. So I want to grow America. I'd love to see a billion Americans like

Matthew Glacier, but I don't want to import them all. I want to extend borders.

And I believe there are ways we can do this that are soft power focus that create tremendous

investment and growth opportunities and are defensively oriented vis-a-vis our competition

and are aggressively dealing with the reality that the middle earth, as I call it,

the lower latitudes is going to suffer greatly. And we either extend networks north to south

to socialize that risk, or they're coming at a level that we're going to find really bad.

And then we are going to be shooting them at the border in large numbers. And I will tell you,

I got two millennials, four Gen Zs. I got six kids. None of them are signing up for that.

None of them are signing up for that definition of America, for that definition of citizenship.

They will never join the military on that basis. Okay. And we're seeing all these institutions

lose credibility, including citizenship and patriotism, because we're not presenting a future

they want that they're comfortable with, that they think reflects values, addresses changes

and challenges that are out there. Instead, we got a boomer generation that's looking towards the past

and wants to re-litigate the past and wants to re-declare or re-run, you know, reboot beloved

franchises from the boomer Cold War universe, as I say in the book. And China's perfect for that.

And China's been around. The boomers know them from way back when. Russia's perfect for that.

This is not the future of what's going to be our world. Ukraine and Taiwan is not the future.

These are tailbone vestiges from the Cold War, and they should be treated as such.

Seriously, systematically, but they're not the future.

Let's close with this, because I'm obsessed with this framework you give me, because I love your,

I'll give you a great paragraph about how our politics are so similar to the roaring 20s and

the Gilded Age, and ultimately, figures such as the Roosevelt's get us out of there. And if we're

speaking to the Gen Zs, millennials and Gen Alpha's need to help get a way out of this here,

you kind of propose this in a political science sense, because people would disagree with the

answers you give on this podcast, but I think your solutions, quote unquote, are responding to

a question. So you say, quote, the, you know, modern political science originated in answering

the question of why did Weimar Germany collapse, leading to Nazism, and then World War Two, those

20,000 deaths a day over over 10 over 10 years, you think the new political science should be

oriented around how today's America surmounts the wickedly complex problems triggered by

globalization success. The answers you've given on this podcast are I think your version of that

political science answer. What would just be your advice to any young listener who hears that question

and finds it galvanizing? What's your advice for people trying to think through these things?

Well, you know, what I say about Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt is they both

came up during periods when political activity and being a politician was considered, you know,

like a dirty low business. And they were scions of a very established family. And in both instances,

their family were like, why would you go into this horrible dirty business? And, you know,

we were lucky they did because they regraded the economic landscape and they made us middle

class centric. They went and did what needed to be done in a progressive era to make sure that we

stay centered on the middle. We are definitely needing such a regrading of the landscape right

now. We got people so rich they could conquer the moon on their own. Okay. And then we got

childhood malnutrition and lack of food security for, you know, one out of five kids in our country.

You know, and that is the kind of disparity that we saw pre the progressive era. It's what happened

again during the Roaring 20s. Both times they came in and said, you know, we're going to have to

rethink capitalism. We're going to have to rethink the role of the state in protecting

parts of our society. And, you know, and in both instances, it begat kind of outward,

transformative foreign policies, open door, great white fleet, all that kind of stuff

with Teddy Roosevelt, first guy to travel abroad, first guy to negotiate a peace treaty

to the Russians, the Japanese 1905 war. I mean, it really altered the presidency. So did FDR,

you know, Biden is trying to do that kind of stuff. He doesn't have the mandate right now.

I don't think anybody gets the mandate as long as the boomers, frankly, are in power because

they're so divisive. And their definition of leadership is not to do something. It's to be

somebody, which is basically to not be the opposition. Republicans want to get in to prevent

the Democrats from being in. Democrats want to get in to prevent the Republicans from being in.

Neither side is all that terribly interested in doing something, just being somebody, which is

not the enemy. And that is where we're stuck right now. So when I'm talking to young people,

I say, please try to get excited about politics. Please try to get organized. Please try to make

yourself involved as much as possible. And then target realistic things that will shake up the

model. And the closest thing I can come up with right now is just to break the model of 50 stars.

You know, I don't care how you do it. Get Puerto Rico in. They'd be the 30th largest population

in America tomorrow. DC, get them in. They're plenty bigger than Wyoming, our small estate.

Anything to break the model and open up the dialogue that says, hey, if Puerto Rico can get in,

why can't somebody else consider that? Because I think that would be the ultimate soft power to

wield against a China and the rest of the world. This notion that you could join the United States,

that would be a card you could play. Whether they did or not, you know, as long as we had some sort

of process that made that feasible, that threat for them would be immensely empowering. If you're

a Philippines dealing with China, this notion that you could become part of the United States,

if you needed to, as a kind of a Trump card, no pun intended, that would be awesome

as a way of countering Chinese influence. And again, I point to the European example.

They have so freaked out the Russians, you know, that when given a chance, they will attract away

from Russia, parts of Russia that they consider to be their core cultural touchstones like Ukraine.

If given the choice, Ukraine goes EU. Georgia. Georgia is a bunch of others. And I would say

North Africa, there are parts of the Middle East that would go if they could get over the

Muslim thing with the Turks. I mean, there are big possibilities there, because there are a lot

of countries that look at this future and say, I don't really want to go alone. I see value in this.

So there is tremendous power to be had, soft power wise, by making this model apparent and

transparent and available. And I would love to see us get into it, because, you know, we keep

asking for having a foreign policy that's not so military centric, and, you know, well, then

develop it, you know, develop the constructs, make the offers, open us back up for business.

Do I think millennials, Gen Zs, could be excited about this kind of future? I think it beats the

one that the boomers are offering, which is almost a non future. It's go to the past or Armageddon

and Civil War. That's what we're being offered by the boomers now. You know, and that's a tragic

That is a direct, not quite optimistic, but also I think direct empirical way to end this

conversation. Thomas, can you just shout out for the people who are listening, can you just shout

the new book out that is out 926? Yeah, it comes out on the 26th of September. You can buy it

anywhere. It's going to be sold in all forms, audio book, ebook, hardcover. It's called America's

New Map, restoring our global leadership in an era of climate change and demographic collapse

published by Ben Bella. It was a book very much in concert with my firm through line.

We're an enterprise design firm. The book is highly illustrated. In fact, one reviewer called it

a graphic novel for futurists. Lots of data visualizations. It is in very small chunks,

the arguments. So it's meant to be read like a series of op-eds with all sorts of visual aids.

We're trying openly to target younger audiences. We know there are a lot of gray beards and gray

heads around the table that aren't going to accept this. That's very familiar territory for me.

I'm not uncomfortable with that. I think there's all sorts of positive

visioning we can do with younger generations about America that they want to build

and a future they want to create. Thank you for joining me on the realignment.

This has been great, Marshall. You do a nice job.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.