Disrupting The Global Order With Janice Stein

Never in human history has there been such opportunity for freedom of expression, one of the core freedoms at the centre of our liberal democracy. If we have Internet access, any one of us can publish almost anything we like and potentially reach an audience of millions. Free speech, as author Timothy Garton-Ash tells us is his new book Free Speech, is essential to the discovery of self, truth, good governance, and diversity. Yet never has there been a time when “truth” has seemed to matter less, when incitement to violence flows unimpeded across frontiers, when stereotypes spread so quickly, and when privacy is violated so easily. Paradoxically, it seems that we have simultaneously too much and too little freedom of speech. Will freedom of speech disrupt or preserve our liberal global order? Garton Ash is Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is director of freespeechdebate.com, a 13 language online project dev

Insurgencies have been around for thousands of years, going back to at least Roman times. A look at history tells us that, far more often than not, insurgents have succeeded in wearing down a far stronger adversary. So what makes a counter-insurgency strategy successful? David Kilcullen is the latest in a long line of historians and strategists who have answered that question. He is the author of The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One and a more general book called Counterinsurgency. He has advised the Australian and the American governments, and worked closely with General David Petraeus to revise the US army’s manual on counter-insurgency. In both these books, David tells us that counter-insurgency is a race against time and victory goes to states who adapt most quickly. Those who win isolate insurgents from their supporters and win their loyalty by protecting the populations at risk. The objective is not to kill insurgents, but to win over the people so they cut off the oxy

A wave of populism has swept through Britain and the United States, and is now sweeping through Europe. There are four critical elections in Europe this year. Will liberal democracy prevail in Europe? Will the centre hold? US President Donald Trump has told the world that from this day forward, it is "America First". People are worried about trade wars, protectionism, and the unravelling of the liberal international order that has been in place since the end of World War II. Jonathan Tepperman is managing editor of Foreign Affairs. Amidst all this alarming news. Tepperman has another story to tell. He has travelled the world to uncover stories of resilience and success, often in the face of overwhelming odds. His is a good news book. He is the author of The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline.

The Trump administration enters the White House as two great powers – Russia and China – are flexing their muscles. Russia is still smarting from the humiliation of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, under President Putin, is determined to reclaim its great power status. China is a rising power, determined to claim its rightful status in the world.  All this as the Trump administration signals an intent to bear less of the burden of the democratic world than it has in the past, and to give primacy to America’s interests at home.  What does this mean for global security? Author Robert Kagan is worried. He sees two significant trend lines emerging. One is the increasing ambition and activism of Russia and China. The other is the declining confidence, capacity, and will of the United States to maintain its dominant position in the world. When these two lines cross, Kagan argues, the world descends into a phase of brutal anarchy. Kagan is the author of a provocative new article in Foreign Policy, Backing In

Much of what we have taken for granted for the last half century is now in question as populist movements sweep through the United States and Europe. Worried liberals are struggling to explain the appeal of populism, protectionism, and ethnic nationalism. Liberal societies have faced these challenges before, most recently in the 1930’s, but never before have the United States and Britain, the apostles of liberal democracy, led the way. How can this have happened? One explanation is the large gap between the universal languages that many global elites speak, and the “ordinary virtues” of citizens that come to life in local contexts in local languages, languages which bear little or no relationship to the global discourses so cherished by the elites.  Michael Ignatieff set out to listen to ordinary citizens. He went to New York, Los Angeles, Rio, Bosnia, Myanmar, Fukushima, and South Africa to listen to the languages ordinary people use as they confront extraordinary challenges. The result is his new book Ordin

In its first few weeks, the Trump administration moved at a rapid fire pace to disrupt the global order. The reaction was predictable. Trump supporters were delighted by the America First agenda that appealed to economic nationalism and reinforced identity politics. Critics were horrified by what they considered outright discrimination against a class of people and the violation of the U.S. constitution.  Amidst the cacophony, concern grew that American democracy could be at risk. Constitutional lawyers and scholars, and columnists across the political spectrum, have begun to worry openly. No one has been more articulate than David Frum in his dystopian article “How to Build an Autocracy,” the cover story of The Atlantic's March edition. Disrupting the Global Order host Janice Stein speaks with Frum about the major American institutions – Congress, the judiciary, and a free press – who comes to the frightening conclusion that none are strong enough.  Frum suggests that only the U.S. citizen can prevent the sl

Who would have imagined that we'd be disputing the fact of “facts”? Yet, the Trump administration routinely accuses the media and its opponents of “lying” and a counsellor to the president, Kellyanne Conway, has added the phrase “alternative facts” to our political vocabulary.  President Donald Trump is giving expression to a process that has been building for some time. Opinions mask as evidence on social media that do not always engage in fact checking.  A public that is not very good at separating fact from fiction, at spotting weak arguments, and sniffing out skimpy evidence is a real challenge in a democracy. So, how did we get from truth to "truthiness"? In his new book, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age, author Daniel Levity walks us through common mistakes we all make that leave us vulnerable to weak arguments and faulty evidence.  Levitin is the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at McGill University and a faculty member at the Haas School of Business

Growing inequality has driven, both indirectly and indirectly, the wave of populist protest that has swept through the developed world in the last few years. For a brief period of some fifty years – from the 1930s to the 1980s – inequality diminished and the middle class grew across the developed world. But the last thirty years tell a different story, as the top 1% takes an increasing share of global wealth and the working poor get less and less.  Can political leaders keep this promise? Can they narrow the income gaps? Can they create the hundreds of thousands of well-paying and secure jobs that they have promised? Can they reduce the disruptive force of inequality? Walter Scheidel says – No. In his provocative new book, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, he sweeps us through thousands of years of history and comes to a very pessimistic conclusion. He tells us that inequality never dies peacefully. Host Janice Stein spoke with Dickason P

For the last fifteen years, the western world has been transfixed by Islamic terrorism that has struck at its geography, its morality, and its sense of self. Western leaders have struggled to understand what has gone wrong within Islam, one of the world’s great religions, and also within the West, the birthplace of liberal democracy. Presidents and prime ministers have tried to fashion a response that would keep citizens safe without destroying the democratic fabric, but with limited success.  How the West continues to deal with its Muslim citizens will shape its future and its long and deep relationship with the larger Muslim world. Author Scott Shane grapples with the moral ambiguities of the West’s response to Islamic terrorism. He tells the gripping story of Anwar al-Awlaki, a once-celebrated American imam, in his new book Objective Troy:  A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone. Scott Shane is a national security reporter for The New York Times based in Washington DC where he has worked for

One of the most disruptive forces, a force that has shaken the global order in the last few decades, is Islamism. In his new book Islamic Exceptionalism, How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World, author Shadi Hamid offers a unique and provocative argument on how Islam is extraordinary in how it relates to politics. Divisions among citizens in the Muslim world aren't simply about power or material factors. They are the product of fundamental disagreements over the nature and purpose of the modern nation state, and the question of religion’s role in public life. Hamid argues for a new understanding of the role religion can play in political and public life, especially in the Arab world. He also makes a strong set of recommendations on how liberal, secular democracies should deal with the Middle East.  

All presidents begin their terms of office with determination to bend the world to the arc of their narrative. But quite quickly, the world shapes the policies of a president as much as the president shapes the world. That said, predispositions do matter. Donald Trump has promised to disrupt the existing global order, to end what he describes as the “free riding” of long-time allies. He has promised to build walls rather than to tear down trade-barriers. And he has promised to slow immigration to the United States rather than welcome the world’s poor and hungry.  Can we make sense of these promises by setting Donald Trump within the long history of American foreign policy? In his prize winning book, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, author Walter Russell Mead argues that the United States has had a more successful foreign policy than any other great power in history.  Host Janice Stein speaks with him about how President Trump could fit into that historical context.

Donald Trump promises to be the most disruptive president of the United States since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932. Like Roosevelt, Trump was elected after a major economic slump that destroyed millions of jobs. Unlike Roosevelt who came to power at the height of the Great Depression, Donald Trump has an economy that is growing again and that is near full employment. But like Roosevelt, who was elected by those who were frightened by their sharp decline in economic fortunes, Trump was elected by those who have been left behind in the new economy, who have not recovered from the Great Recession. How likely is Trump to have this kind of transformative impact on the United States and on the world? Will Donald Trump return the United States to protectionism at home and isolation abroad? Will he break with the fundamentals of America’s postwar leadership? Or will he, as many Americans want him to do, “shake up” the American system and renew its role in the world? Conrad Black is a talented biograph

For more than 300 years, nation-states dominated international conflict and shaped world order. They used all the instruments they had to make the rules that best served their interests. The big powers were the rule-makers and the rest of us were rule-takers. Two decades ago, digital technologies started to shake up that long-standing system. In 2012, the US government acknowledged that it had used these technologies to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program, and Russia and China conducted massive cyber-espionage operations. Cyberspace became a primary battlefield. To make matters worse, cyber attackers often hide behind proxies and leave digital footprints that are difficult to identify. Many of the latest technologies are now in the hands of big companies who have interests that differ from those in government.  Almost all our critical infrastructure is vulnerable to attack. The world order, as cybersecurity expert Adam Segal tells us, is well and truly hacked. Adam Segal joins Disrupting the Global Order hos

The Internet has revolutionized the way we access, communicate, store and share knowledge, but it has been much less successful in providing security and privacy.  The capacity that governments, private companies, and skilled individuals have to hack our world is almost unlimited. We all know that when we fire off information into cyberspace, it is, for all intents and purposes, public. But change is on the horizon. New technology known as Blockchain facilitates transactions without intermediaries. Keeping the user's information anonymous, Blockchain both validates and keeps a permanent public record of all transactions. This development promises to revolutionize financial transactions on the web, make banks irrelevant, and restore trust in digital communications. In the this episode, host Janice Stein speaks with author Don Tapscott about his book, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World. Tapscott, writing with his son Alex, argues that Blockchain t

Great powers have a unique capacity to disrupt the global order. No major leader promises to do so as systematically as Donald Trump.  In a victory that stunned most experts, Trump defeated the experienced Hillary Clinton. He has vowed to tear up free trade agreements, force NATO members to pay their share of expenses, and put American national interests first. If he does what he has promised to do, Trump will disrupt the long-standing liberal international order that western leaders began to build in the ashes of World War II. Who is Donald Trump? What paved the way for his success in the election? Does his past help to explain his present and predict the future? David Cay Johnston is uniquely qualified to answer these questions. A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, he has reported on Trump for nearly 30 years. Covering the long arc of Trump's career in his new book, The Making of Donald Trump, Johnston tells the story of how a boy from a quiet section of Queens, New York became an entirely new a

Nothing has been more disruptive to global order in this last decade than the global economy. The financial crisis that began in the United States in 2007 with the sale of securitized mortgages exploded into a global banking and financial crisis whose effects are still being felt today.  It spilled over into Europe, and exacerbated a financial downturn that continues to ravage the poorer members of the European Union.  Only the United States and Canada seemed to escape these dire consequences. Today, the U.S. economy is fundamentally at full employment, but economic anxiety is high in depressed parts of the country. It is not an exaggeration to say that President-elect Donald Trump is one consequence of the global financial crisis.  Despite a decade of work, few experts are confident that the global financial system is much less vulnerable to disruption than it was ten years ago.  To help us grapple with this dismal prediction, Sherry Cooper, one of Canada’s outstanding economic analysts and a longtime observ

No country has greater capacity to disrupt the global order than China. Despite the slowdown in its economy, China is the world’s largest economic power with a healthy growth rate of about 5%. China is investing heavily in its military and is developing a blue water navy that will expand its global reach. Conscious of its growing influence, China’s leaders are flexing their muscles, alarming their neighbours. This could well be the most dangerous neighbourhood in the world in the decades to come. So what is China’s future? Will the country get rich before it gets old or will it get old before it gets rich? Will it play by international rules or will it insist that others play by the rules it makes? To explore these questions, David Shambaugh, author of China's Future, joins host Janice Stein. 

In this first episode of Disrupting the Global Order, host Janice Stein begins with the biggest power of all - the United States.  China is rising and Russia is raging, but it is still the United States that pushes decisions on the big global issues. There is a great deal that the United States cannot do – especially in far flung regions of the world and particularly with stubbornly independent allies – but nobody can make much progress without the United States.  The twenty-first century, just like the twentieth, is America’s century. Derek Chollet, author of The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World, understands this better than almost anyone. Derek served in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House during the Obama presidency and had a unique opportunity to watch the Obama administration close up.

In this new podcast, host Janice Stein looks at the forces that are disrupting the global order. From religion and technology to economics and politics... these disrupters are everywhere. What are these disruptive forces and how much importance should we give them? Should we let the tension rip or breathe deeply, take a step back, and chill? Come along for the ride as Stein explores the future of the global order, uncovers what’s most likely to tear it apart, and discovers where the shock absorbers are as change rolls through.