Unfriending America

[00:00:00] The Why Curve, with Phil Dobbie and Roger Hearing. Can we get by without America? As the decisions of the Trump White House become less rational and predictable, is there an alternative to adjusting to the latest US policy shift? Can Europe and the UK get by without the force that's guided the global order since 1945? Is an unreliable ally worse than cutting that ally loose? Should we instead look for a coalition of middle powers to fend off Russia and China

[00:00:29] or does the sheer economic and military heft of the United States mean it's still the indispensable nation? And we'll just have to grit our teeth and live in Trump world. The Why Curve. Can you imagine just living in Trump world forever and ever? But I do wonder, look, there is a lot of people now are sick of America, let's be honest, including people within America, but being pushed around,

[00:00:57] the bully in the schoolyard eventually gets beaten, don't they, by everybody else? Well, not always. Not always. That's the problem. I mean, you know, it's a nice thought, you know, perhaps possibly because we're all brought up on American cultural values, you know, Hollywood movies in which the bully gets defeated, but maybe he doesn't this time. Yeah, well, maybe. But, I mean, it would be nice to think that we can somehow pave a way forward where we just don't have to answer to his demands, where we can have a more moderate path going forward.

[00:01:26] So the problem is, is there enough people to form that alliance in a way that they're going to be able to reach an agreement on stuff, you know, without Donald Trump? Maybe we need a bully to try and move things forward. Well, or maybe what we need or what we come to rely on is, you know, the dollar, the technology, the AI, all the various things, as well as the military side of it, which is being a bit reduced at the moment. And we can't, you know, it's like a drug we can't get off, really.

[00:01:54] Yeah, but, I mean, all of that stuff, America is becoming more dominant, not less. So they're starting to produce stuff like AI now, which we're building data centres for, but the technology is basically based in Silicon Valley by and large, and we are going to be even more answerable to America. So that then becomes a bigger concern, and we're having to kowtow to America on that. We're not introducing the legislation that's required, I think because we're scared of him, and we're thinking, well... Yeah, well, he can wave a big stick, and he does. You know, if we start trying to rein in the big tech companies,

[00:02:24] it will tax them, then we get the big stick. So, you know, it's trying to shape yourself, and we know Andy Burnham's having trouble doing this at the moment, around the latest prognostications coming from Trump. What do you do? Well, I mean, it would be nice to get to the situation where he waves the big stick and we go, well, who cares? Because we're not trading with you as much now. Well, trade is a big part of it, of course. But let's talk about whether this is, you know, to what extent we can put sort of guardrails around America and say we'll come back later. Let's talk to someone who studied this,

[00:02:53] Paul Whiteley, who's Professor of Government at the University of Essex, and he joins us now. So, Paul, do you sense that actually the mood is shifting, that we have all kowtowed to America, and we're now getting to a stage where we're actually thinking, I mean, I know we are sort of embedded into the economic system, the global economic system, and we have to work with America, but we're less happy about it, and more places in the world are starting to think, well, how can we get ourselves out of this situation?

[00:03:21] What's happened is actually quite a big deal. It's a breakdown of international order that's been with us since the Second World War, and it looks like we're in what the international relations theorist, Graham Allison, calls the... Thucydides Trap. Forgive me for mispronouncing that,

[00:03:49] but he was a Greek philosopher. Oh, the Thucydides. You got the trap bit right. Yes, exactly. And the Chinese have been worrying about this, and some Americans have been worrying about this. The basic idea is pretty simple. It's that when there is a powerful, dominant country that can oversee the international order, what the IR people call a hegemon,

[00:04:18] then you get stability. But once that stability breaks down by a challenge from a rising power, the risk of war goes up, and indeed I think Allison investigated 12 cases of this historically, and it happened in nine of them, I think. It ended in war, and that's what we're in. The US is the dominant power,

[00:04:48] was the dominant power in the 20th century, and of course Britain was the dominant power in the 19th century, but now the dominance of the US has declined, and Trump has added to this, accelerated this, and so we're in this trap, which potentially could create war, but it certainly creates instability in the international system. But is it war, or is it just people getting jack of just being pushed around by America?

[00:05:17] So for example, situation in Europe where we start to go, do you know what? You can impose all the tariffs you want. We're going to impose tariffs as well, and we're going to impose legislation, we are going to try and become far more self-sufficient, develop new trading partners. We are just not that keen to trade as much with the United States as we used to. We are going to find alternatives, because you are pushing us around, and we are, in the words of that great film, we are as mad as hell, I'm talking about network, we're as mad as hell,

[00:05:47] and we're not going to take this anymore. And not necessarily a war, just that we don't want you as a partner anymore, because we don't trust you, and you are too dominant. Yes, and the interesting thing is, our recent polling, and of course we're coming up to the midterm elections in a week or two in the US, shows that the American public don't trust Trump either. Yeah. There's a poll carried out by The Economist and YouGov

[00:06:17] on the 12th of October. So it's pretty up to date, and it's got some startling figures in it about what the Americans think about their president. The questions are, they ask these questions, can you give us some descriptors of President Trump? Do you agree that these descriptors apply to him or not?

[00:06:44] And it turns out that some 54% of Americans think that Trump is corrupt. 52% think he's dangerous. 47% think he's out of touch. And 46% think he's a racist. Now, on the other side, there are people who favour him. 34% think he's wrong.

[00:07:14] Those percentages are not as high as you'd like him to be, are they? And it's because you're thinking, well, surely 85% would be thinking he's racist. But it would be interesting to compare those percentages with what other parts of the world think, because some of those are sort of like 50-50. And I wonder whether that's also part of the equation, that we think, we don't want to trade with Donald Trump, but also, does that mean that if he goes, then the rest of the world says, well, it's okay now, we're happy to work with America

[00:07:43] in the way that we always have in the past, because Donald Trump has gone. Or is this fixed now? Because we think, hang on, this is a country that voted for this guy, twice, twice, and even though those polls are showing it's 50-50, close to 50% of the population clearly think, you know, he's still an all right guy, and it's okay to bully the rest of the world. So I just wonder whether the trust is gone totally now. So, Paul, I suppose, because there's still that, is it just Trump, or is it America?

[00:08:12] The country that voted for it. it's both. This decline is inexorable, really, because, you know, there's a rise and decline of nations in terms of their power. So, it's something that happens and has repeatedly happened in history, but there's the issue of how quick it is. And what Trump's done is accelerated it greatly, the decline of American power. And as you say, the result has been Europe, certainly,

[00:08:42] and other countries. The Canadians, as you know, are seeking an associate membership of the European Union. We're not sure what that means, but, you know, you can see it happening. And so, they are shifting away from America, weakening its power in the longer run. So, he succeeded in alienating a lot of his allies and actually giving heart to Putin, as we know.

[00:09:13] But if we went back, if we went, Paul, if we went back 10 years, say, to the first Trump administration, 2016, the whole move then, I mean, before that, people weren't saying this so much. I mean, if you look at the experience under Bush Jr., but also under, of course, Obama, I mean, yes, there were blips, but people weren't saying this can't go on. I mean, you know the phrase, the indispensable nation, which was, of course, Madeleine Albright

[00:09:42] talking back in Clinton days about what it was. But really, at that point, was it true then, even, that people were saying, well, America's period is over? There's always been a section of the Republicans who are isolationists. Now, it was very big before the Second World War, in fact, made it difficult for the US to join the war and the Japanese, of course, made it easy. But since then,

[00:10:10] especially in the MAGA crowd, Make America Great Again, there's quite a lot of people who want to stay out of the Middle East, want to stay out of involvement in the world in general and make America great. And what he's done by instituting this war in the Middle East is alienated a lot of them, which is adding to his problems

[00:10:40] in the upcoming elections. And so, I think overall, he's been a catalyst for accelerating the perception of decline, which has always been there, but it was kind of on the fringe in the Republican Party, but now is becoming more and more important to his base. And, of course, he's alienated very strongly Democrats and independents, who, and the latter, by the way,

[00:11:11] people who say in surveys, I'm not a Democrat or a Republican, I'm an independent. That's a big group, and it's largely, these days, anti-Trump. And so he's accelerated the phenomena that's been in the background slowly, but has really come to the fore. And actually, in the literature on wars, there's a huge book

[00:11:40] by Paul Kennedy, a big tome, nearly 1,000 pages, and what it shows is this phenomena of the trap and how this has been occurring over time in different eras. But there's a political science database referring to the power of nations

[00:12:08] and the ability for them to fight wars. And the key argument with Paul Kennedy is pretty simple, that if you fight a war and you don't have the resources of your opponents, you're going to lose it. And this was very, quite clear indeed in the First World War. You know, in the Second World War, Hitler took on Russia, the United States and the British Empire and, you know,

[00:12:36] it was destined to fail no matter how much they fought. Now, this database shows that the Chinese in terms of the key indicators, population, standards of living, abilities to create weapons, research and development in weaponry and in science outdo the Americans right now. So, if there was a war, this is a hypothetical argument,

[00:13:06] but if there was a war now between America and China with America on its own because it's alienated its allies, the Americans would lose. But I mean, would that... Right. Because, yeah, because they don't have the resources. But it just don't... That's right. The Chinese out-resourced them and that happens. That's happened right now. Now, it's not something that's going to happen, you know, in 10 years or anything. In fact, as I'm sure you know, the size of the Chinese Navy is larger than the US Navy.

[00:13:36] Yeah. But why would they want a war? I mean, that's... I mean, you're talking about... No, they wouldn't. Yeah. So... But the point is nations blunder into it when there's spheres of influence created and alliances that interlock are created. Yeah. And they can be drawn in to the war. You're a stage now where, as we said, nobody wants war. There is perhaps the logic of the Thucydides trap to talk about.

[00:14:05] But in the immediate situation, you have Europe, you have Japan, you have Canada, all saying, well, we don't really like dealing with the US as it is at the moment. We might want to move away. But how possible is that? I mean, America is so dominant economically, clearly, militarily, but as you say, perhaps that's shaving away culturally, certainly. Can we actually say... And let's not forget technology, let's forget AI, which is... Yeah, absolutely.

[00:14:33] So can we actually do that or do we, of necessity, have to keep dealing with the Trump White House and America because there's no alternative? Well, I think currently, politicians throughout the rest of the world, especially US's traditional allies are horrified with what's been happening with Trump. And the hope is that he will be ousted and fail and the Republicans that have been captured by the Trumpists will fail miserably in the, first of all,

[00:15:03] in the midterms, but then later on two years' time in the presidential elections. So the hope is that America will begin to turn this around and they'll certainly want to help America and build bridges. There'll be a lot of statesmen from all over the world going to meet the new president if it turns out that he's a Democrat, he or she's a Democrat. So it's not lost. It's not a lost cause. But suppose

[00:15:32] this continues, which is possible, then you are going to see the new world being one of spheres of influence with no underpinning legal acceptance, no rule of law other than might is right. and in those circumstances the likelihood of war

[00:16:01] in the longer run is actually quite high. It's interesting, isn't it, that if you remember George Orwell's 1984 novel written before the Second World War, he talked about, you know, three big conglomerate states in the world in Asia, in America and in Europe and constantly at war with each other,

[00:16:30] spheres of influence, constantly at war, switching sides but then claiming that they didn't switch sides, lots of lies and all that, you know. And there's an eerie echo of that novel in present trends if it goes bad. But if the Trumpists can be defeated and rolled back and the Republican Party is going to have to rebuild itself, then we can turn this around.

[00:17:01] So that's why I think upcoming elections in the immediate future, but also obviously the presidential election two years time is so important. So you talked about American isolationists, difficult to say for some reason, not for most people but for me clearly. So the isolationists there we are in America, so they want, I would have thought, they'd be quite happy for Donald Trump to get his way in that

[00:17:31] America is going to produce goods made by Americans for Americans. Who cares about international trade? I feel like that's why he's saying, you know, let's bring jobs back home. He doesn't necessarily talk about America being a big export nation because obviously it is currently a net importer. It exports a lot of services but it imports a lot of manufactured goods. So do they care, actually, if the rest of the world says, you know what, we're not going to buy as much from you anymore because we don't trust you. We're going to build our own arms,

[00:18:01] we're going to build our own technology, the stuff that we traditionally used to buy. Sure, you can make it for yourself, for your domestic markets, very happy for you to do that. You can stick tariffs up to try and protect that. Those tariffs will probably mean that you're not going to make it as effectively as the rest of the world. And Europe says, so we will trade with Canada, we'll trade with China, we'll trade with Oceania, we'll trade with emerging countries in Asia. We'll just keep America out of that because those isolationists, they're quite happy on their own over there, big population, they can probably sustain themselves

[00:18:31] quite happily, just not participating in world trade. And they might be happy with that. That might be the outcome that those isolationists want. Well, two things about that. If you don't have a hegemon who will maintain some order in the world, I mean, there's never 100% order in the world and we know that the rule of law doesn't really exist between nations. But if you don't have a hegemon that can dominate, then international

[00:19:01] trade can then start to break down. and it's an important component to economic growth and economic prosperity. Some people exaggerate the importance of trade. One of the debates we have in Britain about Brexit, people have tended to exaggerate the significance of trade between the UK and the EU as a source of standards of living and growth. It's important, but there's a lot of other

[00:19:31] things too. But if you don't have a hegemon, it starts to break down everywhere because stealing then becomes more profitable than trading. And without the rule of law, you can't guarantee if you buy something it's going to be delivered. So the wider political system influences the extent to which economic prosperity and growth is possible. And

[00:20:00] that's the worry. Now, I think fundamentally the Chinese model is flawed because of this. What the Chinese want to do is export everywhere and let's face it, they're being very successful, especially in relation to electric cars and so on. They've been very successful at the moment, but they don't want to import. And that's fundamentally unstable. The European Union is discussing ways in which it can stop

[00:20:30] Chinese dumping, as they call it. You know, that's subsidizing exports. And I think the fundamental problem they've got is they regard their customers as enemies. if you run a company and you regard your customers as enemies, it's not going to be very successful in the long run. So the Chinese have got this problem too. So what I'm saying really is that moving away from America and

[00:20:59] reducing allowing America to do its own thing is only the start of a process that might dismantle international trade pretty much completely and that would be very bad for economic growth across the world. And we've also got the dollar to worry about. This is the thing with the context we all trade in dollars. I mean no one's going to start trading internationally in renminbi before too long. The euro isn't really a challenger. So isn't that going to mean that we

[00:21:29] can't rope off the US and say there'll be dragons we're not having to do with them because we all have to work in the idea of the bank or that we had an international trading currency that was just there. It was basically the interim currency that everybody used. So we didn't have the reserve currency wasn't the US dollar. was the bank or we could reinstate that. The Americans wouldn't like it very

[00:21:59] much. Now with the Chinese of course probably not going to stand on. It's not going to happen immediately. No that's right. Immediately it's difficult to move off a dollar standard. But think about this. What Trump has done and before him other American presidents is build up a huge debt internationally. Their debt owed to other countries largely because these countries have been buying American treasuries and investing in America

[00:22:29] and so on. It's huge. Now once that starts to affect the dollar in a relatively quiet way, you might notice that the sterling value of the dollar has been strengthening against the dollar. And what that can mean is that the absolute anchor for international trade, which is US treasuries,

[00:22:58] they're not at risk because they're absolutely solidly backed by the American government is the founding stone of that dollar strength, that dollar hegemony, if you like. But that's weakening. And what countries are doing, and the Chinese particularly, is moving away from the dollar very carefully and thinking about other currencies, principally the

[00:23:28] euro, but, you know, baskets of currencies, and also, of course, Bitcoin and currencies that are AI based. Bitcoin is very risky, so I don't see it dominating immediately, but if you have stable coins, that's to say electronic money backed by governments,

[00:23:58] then all governments can contribute to this, and you could have an international equivalent of Bancor, which was Keynes' idea, and by a process that is slow to begin with, but might speed up, replace the dollar. So if we go down that road, imagine the world where maybe we go, well, trading with China, I take your point that they are an unreliable trading partner perhaps, but they do produce. I wonder whether part of the fact

[00:24:28] that they're not importing as much as they're exporting is just because they've got to see their domestic economy kick in, and of course everyone's steeped in housing debt there, because they absolutely completely miss the mark in terms of trying to control housing, which is a big problem about the way they operate. Obviously money just gets piled into stuff without regular checks and balances, but it's left people with a lot of debt, and I wonder whether that's part of the pattern. But if we see an evolution within China where they

[00:24:57] become a more reliable trading partner, so you've got China, you've got Europe, you've got places like Australia and Canada, all trading together, I mean, and America just loses its power, doesn't it? And that's what happens then. How does America react if they find that situation? That's part of the process we're talking about, namely, an international order that's stable, underwritten by American military and soft power,

[00:25:27] is being replaced by spheres of influence, much as George Orwell predicted. And spheres of influence don't have a strong record over time of maintaining the peace. In fact, the research shows the opposite is true. Spheres of influence can easily develop into wars. There's a little anecdote about the First World War, which your listeners may have heard.

[00:25:56] The Emperor of Austria was of course related to the King of Britain, King of England. And 24 hours after the war had been declared, and of course Austria was on the side of Germany, he sent a message to his relative, King of England, saying, this is very unfortunate and I do hope the unpleasantness between us will be settled in the near future.

[00:26:26] You know, Austria and Britain weren't enemies, but they were dragged in to a bigger conflict on different sides, and of course it ended up with the collapse of the Austrian Empire, which was huge before the First World War. Yes, more than a little unpleasantness there. Yes, exactly. I suppose you were talking about the international order breaking down, because historically the US has been the policeman with the big truncheon effectively keeping that order going, but if

[00:26:56] America is to be pushed to one side, or inevitably goes that way, and you talk about spheres of influence, but is there not possible for say Canada, the UK, the EU, perhaps Japan, to have a sort of alliance of middle states that do have enough economic potentially, but also military power to maintain a kind of order that could replace that? Because I wonder whether George Orwell when he wrote 1984 was actually envisaging a world where there was quite so much international trade,

[00:27:26] so that sphere of influence perhaps is less antagonistic if people are trading together. Yeah, there are other scenarios, it's perfectly true, and Mark Carney's idea of, you know, that you've quoted, the middle powers alliance sort of thing is a very good idea and the Canadians are really pursuing this for obvious reasons, but one thing that's exasperating

[00:27:55] about the EU's response to the Russian aggression is that they won't release the funds frozen in largely in Belgian banks to the Ukrainians to buy weapons to protect themselves. It's an obvious thing to do, it would really help, but they can't get the consensus needed to do it. So the trouble with

[00:28:25] a middle nation alliance is if it's too loose, it won't get things done. And indeed, one of the propaganda aims of the Russians is to try to discrate NATO, say it's not going to work, people are going to defect, the Americans aren't going to help, blah, blah, blah, that kind of stuff. And the cohesion of a particular

[00:28:55] society, a particular group, has to be strong enough for them to stick with it even when things look bad. And while the European Union has stepped in very carefully to provide funds for Ukraine when America has retreated from that, then it's still limited in what it is willing to do because of the fact that there's

[00:29:25] so many different interests, so many different countries with their own agendas and you haven't got the unity you need to make a particular regional organisation really effective when it comes down to the serious business of war and so on. I'm not saying the EU has failed in relation to Ukraine because I think they've done a lot. But it is interesting that the

[00:29:54] bankers are saying, oh no, we can't do that, we can't help Ukraine. And it's baffling to somebody when you look at the risks that Europeans are facing from Russian aggression. Well, the fiscal rules in Europe are clearly a problem and we're seeing that in France, the fact that the rules set out are just too tight in terms of the amount of debt that individual countries can carry. It would be an entirely different situation, of course, and this is completely fanciful because

[00:30:24] you can see it's never going to happen, but a United States of Europe would completely change the shape of the world, wouldn't it? Oh, sure. But remember what Europe is really. It's dominant powers chiefly Germany, France, to less extent Italy and Spain, and then a whole lot of other countries that are very small and with diverse interests. There's a big difference, for instance,

[00:30:53] between Northern Europe and Southern Europe, as we know, in all sorts of ways, in the economy and politics and so on. So it's not surprising because, you know, the last time Europe was unified was by Charlemagne hundreds of years ago. And so it's not surprising that it's hard to get the unity needed. And indeed, the war on Ukraine is helping with that. I think it's making Europeans more united.

[00:31:23] But there's always a free rider in these situations if you don't have enough central authority, somebody who thinks, well, let the others do it, I'm not going to bother. I mean, the Americans, as you know, and Trump have accused the Spanish of being that. And they're very angry about the Spanish saying, well, we're not going to raise defense spending. There's always that issue if you don't have the central authority. And the central authority doesn't come from a dictator.

[00:31:53] It comes from people feeling close enough, culturally similar, identity similarities that allow them to work together and make sacrifices for the big picture as opposed to themselves. If you ask that of the people of Europe, though, if you ask irrespective of where in Europe they are, do you have more in common with other people within Europe than you do with the United States or with Asia? Most people go, yes, I'm European, wouldn't they? There's that

[00:32:23] identifiable region that they would say, well, we're closer to that. I might be Spanish, but I'm closer to German than I am to American, for example. Yeah, that's been true for a long time. They ask questions about how close do you feel to different nationalities in various international surveys? Peer research in the US has done this over the years. And you find, not surprisingly, people who live geographically near you with similar cultures and so on, similar standards of living,

[00:32:53] you like them better than you like people who are distant. And that's not surprising. But I'm talking about something else, which is a sense of identity that overcomes the collective action problem that all states face. And the collective action problem in a federal, in an alliance structure, is there's always somebody who wants to free ride. And actually, in one respect, Trump is quite right that Europe has been free

[00:33:23] riding in defence on America since the Second World War. And, you know, successive presidents have argued about this, pointed it out, but Europe hasn't done anything until now. And so that is a key thing. Threat can make you more unified, but it's a big exercise to make people think collectively that they're part of a big picture.

[00:33:53] It's going to be a really hard thing to do that with Europe. I think we can all see that it's not a natural power in and of itself, I think. And it needs to be more unified in actually building its own defence system, which means it's investing its own defence infrastructure, its own companies, and not buying from America. I mean, that could backfire on Donald Trump if everyone stops buying arms from America and starts manufacturing domestically within Europe. Yeah. And there's a thing called the European Social

[00:34:23] Survey, which has been conducted since the 1990s. And it asks all sorts of questions, you know, about people's values, beliefs, religion, so on and so forth. And one of the questions it's regularly asked is about, do you think of yourself as European or French? You know, how important is national identity? And it's very important and it can change. But you get the picture from these surveys that very

[00:34:52] few think of themselves primarily as Europeans. They, you know, there's multiple identities, so it's not just one trick, you know, fits all. But the dominant identities are national ones in Europe and then and the people who think of themselves purely as Europeans tend to think that their national identity

[00:35:21] is the first thing and then maybe down the list a bit comes being European. So, Paul, as we kind of draw this to a bit of a conclusion, I mean, what you're saying is America, even without Trump, is going into this position of being a declining power, a declining influence on the world, no longer the only superpower, the only hegemon. And even, I mean, I think I'm right, really right, even if there is a Democrat president from 2028, it's not something that can be

[00:35:51] reversed. So we've just got to get used to a world, and Europe is part of that, I guess, surviving in a much more dangerous environment. There really is, what you're saying, no way back from that. Well, it can be slowed and even reversed with new leadership in America. You know, in fact, the Trump administration, eight years of it, when it's finally over, has been a disaster for American power and reputation throughout the world.

[00:36:19] And it can be reversed to some extent. So we can't predict, it's like volcanoes, you know, we know it's going to blow, but we don't know when. And at the moment, it's pretty clear from all sorts of indicators that American power measured very broadly, military, soft, trade, political influence, and so on and so forth, is declining vis-a-vis China.

[00:36:50] And I think the currently, it looks like the Chinese and Russian alliance is stronger than any relationship between Russia and the United States operating through Trump. Trump. So it's easy to see how a declining power in the broad sense of the United States will be up against a Russian-Chinese

[00:37:19] alliance that increasingly dominates with a lot of different values and regional identities feeling, and a world that collectively overall has no rules. The great problem in international relations has always been when you take the world as a whole, there isn't a rule of law. But we can make laws apply and modify

[00:37:48] that to some extent by international organisations and so on. But if regional powers with different values about what is legitimate and they're not democratic, dominate, those won't work and you'll have regional hegemonies and unfortunately the history, as I say, shows that these end up often with wars.

[00:38:17] Very depressing outlook there, but it is a question of democracy, isn't it? So Europe's held back a little bit because it's got democracy coming out its ears. The United States has got democracy, but it's a bit of a broken democracy because there's way too much power put in the hands of one man, which is what we're seeing now. China, Russia has democracy as well. It's just coincidence that one man keeps on winning and then China obviously doesn't even pretend.

[00:38:47] so that's part of the problem. As you say, we're dealing with the most powerful parts of the world now. Don't play by any rules whatsoever. And that's a scary prospect because we are going to have to deal with them because they're going to be such a significant part of the power of the planet and also a producer of the goods that we want to consume. Yes, I think that's broadly correct. correct. And that's one scenario.

[00:39:17] Do we just roll over? Do we just before you get into the other one, do we just roll over and accept that then? I mean, it's quite clear that the world is adapting to Trumpism and it's isolating and weakening the US as a result. But at the moment, it's still strong

[00:39:45] enough to make wars of aggression difficult to support. The Chinese desperately want to absorb Taiwan, but I doubt they'll start a war to do that right now. But give it a few years if American power continues to decline and the divisions and

[00:40:14] polarization in that society grows stronger, then it might be a different story. The big issue in world politics is the balance and democracy and autocracy is the balance between central authority and freedom for individuals. And if that goes wrong, too much authority, generally what happens is autocracy start to

[00:40:43] decline and corruption grows, blah, blah, blah. But on the other hand, if you have too much democracy, you can't get anything done. And balancing those two is the key thing to successful futures for states across the world. Aristotle's circle, I think, wasn't it, going from autocracy through democracy and round again. There's a sort of ever-ending cycle. Well, perhaps Aristotle is a

[00:41:13] good moment to call this to a halt, going back to the ancient times and I suppose semi-contemporary with Thucydides. So that kind of brings us full circle as well. And maybe we should just try a dictator in Europe for, you know, let's just try it for five or ten years, just see how much power would Europe have if we didn't have this pesky pesky democracy getting in the way. Well, you know, people in France can protest all they like, but you know, they're not going to topple the leader. Yes, well, I think we've kind of been there in Europe and we've had quite a number of that. But anyway.

[00:41:43] And it didn't end well. Well, it didn't finish the job. Maybe if they finished the job, that's where we'd be. Oh dear. Let's end on a controversial note. I prefer Greek philosophy myself. Paul, thank you very much indeed. That was really depressing, but thank you. You're welcome. Of course, the problem the UK's got is that it just doesn't have enough money to do stuff. So how can you sort of like compete against a nation like the

[00:42:12] United States when you can't produce stuff because there's just not enough money to be spent in the economy? I mean, you know, business is not expanding, loans aren't happening, and the government is stuck really without too much disposable income to spend on anything other than the absolute essentials. Well, and a lot of it paying off the debt on the interest that we've already got on the loans we've got. So, I mean, it's a real bind for them. And, of course, next week, the new Chancellor, Healy, is going to be looking at

[00:42:42] what he can do next. It's funny because I'm just thinking the last Healy who was in that position, of course, in the 1970s, not vastly different. A different person entirely, but, you know, similar issues. But we'll find out. Doesn't have the bushy eyebrows. Well, quite no eyebrows. Well, some eyebrows, virtually no hair. But, yes, it's not really his styling we're interested in so much as what he wants to do with the economy. And hopefully we'll get to a stage. I mean, there'll be a lot of talk, of course, about the budget, but what we want to do is do a step back and look at where does

[00:43:12] this actually leave the economy as a whole? You know, at least the emphasis... How does Britain, in effect, how does Britain get out of the situation that's here? Whether it's money in people's bank balances or whether it's government money, there just isn't enough to do what people want to do. And so how does Britain get out of that situation where it can get growth back again? And there seems to be no immediate answer to that.

[00:43:42] Well, let's see what answers he has come up with, which will be the subject of next week's Y-curve. It'll be a political answer, that's for sure. Yep, next week on The Y-curve. Join us for that. We'll see you then. Thanks for joining us today. The Y-curve.