The Next American Century | Nina Hachigian & Mona Sutphen | Talks at Google

So I'm very pleased to welcome Mona Sutphin and Nina Hachigian to the Google San Francisco office here today to discuss their book, the Next American how the U.S. can Thrive as Other Powers Rise. Mona is a Managing Director at Stonebridge, a leading international advisory firm. As a former Foreign Service officer, she served in Asia and in Europe and while at the White House worked on a range of policy issues for the National Security Advisor. Nina is a Senior Vice President and Director for California at the center for American Progress. She's worked at the RAND Corporation as director of its center for Asia Pacific Policy and at the Council on Foreign Relations, where she did research on the Internet in China, a subject Google has become well acquainted with in the last several years. Nina has also been on the staff of the National Security Council. We look forward to hearing today more about Mona and Nina's refreshing and optimistic approach to American foreign policy that views competing entities as partners and is a model I think Google tries to emulate as an increasingly global corporate citizen. Please join me in welcoming Mona and Nina.

Thank you, Michael, and thanks everybody for coming. American foreign policy has been highly preoccupied lately, to say the least, in the Middle East. And during that time, the last six years or so, the big power landscape has really shifted very dramatically. And now, for the first time in history, we have several large assertive powers appearing on the scene. And with that change has come a great deal of anxiety, as I don't know if any of you saw the New York Times, the COVID story of the Sunday magazine yesterday, but it's very reflective of that anxiety. So we wrote this book to answer the question for ourselves, how will the rise of China and the other big powers, we call them pivotal powers, India, Russia, Japan and the European Union, how will they affect the future of the United States and of our children? Will our kids be safer with a stronger China and India in the world, or less safe? Will they be more prosperous than us or not as well off? So we did our analysis, we tried to, at least with very open minds about the answers to these questions. And we expected that we'd find that the rise of these big powers is a very mixed bag for Americans. So the conclusion that we reached really surprised us. It runs counter to the sort of ingrained zero sum framework that a lot of us have about big powers, that if they're getting stronger, we must be getting weaker, et cetera. And our conclusion is that on balance, the rise of China, India, Russia, the European Union and Japan actually brings opportunities for Americans a chance to be safer and More, more prosperous. The pivotal powers basically want what we want. They want an orderly world with open trade. And they're on our team in many ways against the common threats that we all face, like terrorism, climate change, disease. And we should leverage their power, not fear it. And if the US focuses on getting our own house in order here at home, we can really thrive in this new era. As I said, the conclusion sort of upends our typical framework. We've more often than not been very suspicious of other big powers. 20 years ago it was the Soviet Union. Then the Soviet Union fell apart, and shortly thereafter it was Japan that was the focus of our fears, even though they're a democracy in a very small country and an ally. Then Japan's economy imploded and there were warnings about Germany, then there were warnings about a united Europe. Both of those went away. And today it's China, India and Russia that typically worry us.

So today we thought we'd start by explaining kind of how we got to this optimistic view, the way we thought through the book, our thinking, and the way the book is laid out. So first, at the highest level, we concluded that of course, direct conflict between the powers, these pivotal powers is always possible, but it's not inevitable. And some people would argue that it is inevitable. And we just don't see that that's the case anymore for pretty fundamental reasons. First, obviously, we have an incredibly strong military, and just our geographic position being bordered by two giant oceans makes it that much more difficult for somebody to come and invade us or attack us. It's obviously possible, but unlikely, or less likely. But even more fundamentally, globalization and technology have changed the way states interact. Just the way it's changed everything that everyone does in their lives on a day to day basis. First, we live in the nuclear era. So obviously the risk and consequences of conflict among nuclear states has really unthinkable consequences. And that raises the bar for any direct clash. But second, territory no longer will help a country become wealthier. You know, it used to be in the, you know, a century ago that people made big powers went to war with each other, usually over territory, over resources and commodities. And now with commodity markets, you don't need to do that anymore. And even more importantly, as economies have shifted to economies where brain power and a surface economy, those things are what are driving value in economies. And you can't really, you know, invade another country and then hope to get their knowledge workers to be competitive, to be productive and be competitive. It just doesn't really work anymore. Knowledge workers like you guys like you guys, right? Exactly. You can imagine if you had a foreign, you know, somebody lording over you, you wouldn't, you know, just show up maybe at work or maybe not at all. And then third, economic interdependence is so much more tightly intertwined than it was even during, at the eve right before World War I, where most historians point to an era of kind of similar interdependence. But back then it was really just trade based. And today we literally own pieces of each other's economies. What is American, what is Japanese. Those lines are blurring every day. It's not that simple anymore. And obviously, as we own, we have then, as we own pieces of each other, the stakes, we actually have a stake in stability in those countries and raises the risk of conflict. And then finally, there's something that we point out in the book, which is called, you know, kind of genuine security interdependence. And this is genuinely new in the international system. And by that we mean that because there are threats like terrorism and pandemic disease and climate change, that we in fact need other powers to keep Americans safe in America. And that is a fundamental departure from the way foreign policy worked in the past, where countries were able to protect their citizens inside their borders without the help of other outside countries. And that has radically then changed the way countries are willing to cooperate, or maybe not willing to cooperate, but hopefully cooperate. So when we start off on the book, started off on the book because we came to this conclusion, well, if a clash isn't inevitable, then let's think, well, okay, so what are the implications of the rise of these powers on specific concrete things that Americans care about, whether it's our security, our economic prosperity and our values.

So we began with security with really a blank slate, and tried to think about what is the hierarchy of threats that could harm Americans, starting from sort of the most deadly and working our way down. And the good news is that there are only two outside agents that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans today or tomorrow. And that is a terrorist with a nuclear device and pandemic disease. So when it comes to tackling terrorists, we discovered that we are very reliant on the pivotal powers and they on us. It's likely the case that some Americans already owe their lives to the good police work in Scotland Yard, which have stopped some terrorist attacks, transatlantic terrorist attacks. Midway, China is a member of the Container Security Initiative, which means that they allow our inspectors in their ports to screen the shipping containers that reach our shores every day for smuggled nuclear material, and there's 3 million of those every year. India is another great example. India has been tracking radical Islamic extremist groups for decades. And some of those very same extremist groups are now targeting the United States. In 2003, they were a number of suspects that had trained with this group called the let, rested in the Virginia suburbs. And India knows a lot more about the LET than we ever will. So we're really reliant on their knowledge to keep our citizens safe. And finally, Russia, for all its bluster, is co chairing with us a group of 50 nations that are trying to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. And of course, it's Russia where there are thousands of nuclear weapons lying around, not properly secured. So if we want to keep those out of the hands of terrorists, we have to really work with Moscow, unsavory as that may be sometimes. And on disease, we are really reliant on China and other nations to stamp out new outbreaks before disease reaches our shores. SARS spread to six countries in a matter of hours. And so when it comes to disease, we should really be hoping for rich pivotal powers with great public health infrastructure and even on less sort of immediately threatening security issues like Iran and North Korea. Like it or not, we cannot make any progress in terms of trying to roll back nuclear programs without the deep engagement of other big powers. North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons without China pressuring them to do so. And on the climate crisis, the US and the other pivotal powers are the problem, but also the solution. This is really a big slave sleeper issue in national security terms, but it's going to be huge, as we will see in the years to come. And we basically all need to be like Japan, much more energy efficient. China and India are polluting like crazy, China in particular. But until we ourselves move to a low carbon economy, we give them basically a free political pass to continue to pollute.

And so, you know, but that's not to say we didn't see any downside on the security side. You know, the only places, though, where we did see a tangible kind of immediate downside to the rise of these other powers were on the more amorphous threats, that is, you know, threats to American prestige, to our freedom of movement that we've come so used to having, and obviously to our allies and our friends, so kind of a third party conflict. And here our conclusions were less decisive because it depends on the, you know, situation. Obviously, things like Taiwan could turn into a clash, but they don't have to and it's pretty clear that as they rise, as they gain influence, they are going to constrain America's freedom of movement. You see this already in lots of ways, diplomatically, that we just can't get our way the same way that we used to be able to get our way. It makes our lives difficult, but it is one of the realities of having, you know, stronger, pivotal powers. But we think the positive sides of their growth outweigh those negative downsides. But for the most part, it's going to complicate our diplomacy. But then when we looked at kind of what the US has done to itself over the last seven years in terms of how it's pursuing its international affairs abroad, you know, we've done a lot more harm to ourselves than anything that the other powers have done to our foreign policy in pursuing our cause. And so it just seemed to us kind of illogical to zero in on China and India or Russia as threats when there are actually people who are trying to kill us out there today. And more importantly, we need the help of those countries in order to stop that from happening. And I suppose one of the more encouraging things is that at least, you know, some Americans seem to really get this instinctively. We were surprised that we've been doing radio kind of across the country. We were doing a radio interview with Christian radio, very conservative Christian radio in Florida. And, you know, the interviewer was completely on board with this. He was, you know, it doesn't make any sense to focus on China. You know, it's like, you know, you're worried about the beginnings of rheumatoid arthritis when you have, you know, your arm is bleeding profusely and it won't make any difference. And I was like, yeah, I guess that's right. So that's the good news is that, you know, the Americans are kind of. Many Americans are there.

So that was security. So let's take a look now at American prosperity and see how the rise of the big powers affects that overall. The economic growth of big powers actually supports our economic growth. If you look at the highest level in recent years, China, the Chinese, the Indian and the Russian economies have grown dramatically. Our trade with them has grown dramatically. But until recently, well, but that trade has not harmed our economy. Our economy has also grown, at least until recently. They are big export markets for us. US exports to China from 2000 to 2005 grew by 158% compared to 12% for the rest of the. And I read last week that Ford sales are actually increasing somewhere and that's in China. They are sources of capital for us. They are now bailing out some of our banks. And cheap manufacturing in China has extended the paychecks of millions of Americans, particularly low income Americans. So overall, our pie, the American pie, is growing because of trade with those economies. It's of course up to us to make sure that we are dividing the pie fairly at home. As we know, low income and middle class incomes have really stagnated lately. But that's our problem to fix, not China or India's.

And even despite the big positive picture, obviously there are lots of concerns at the kind of micro level about how the pivotal powers affect our economy. And you hear about this a lot, whether it's competition for oil, that we're going to get into a fight over oil, or the concerns about the trade deficits, capital flight. And we can't go into all of them here. We talk about all the big ones in the book, but we can talk about two today. One is outsourcing and the other one is innovation. I'm sure you guys are probably totally aware of a lot of this, but you know, obviously some jobs in the United States are lost because of the move of jobs overseas. You read about it all the time, but it turns out it's a really teeny tiny number of jobs. Offshoring accounts for about 2% of the lost jobs in the American economy. Many, many, many, many more jobs are lost in the economy because of technology changes. And you guys know this, you know, the efficiencies that the economy brings about that changes, restructures the economy, creating some new jobs. Other jobs get lost. And you know, the American economy creates and destroys about 25,000 jobs an hour for every hour that the, that the economy is open for business. But the big challenge then comes back to public policy, which is of course some workers, particularly in particular industries, are going to feel the pain of the disruptions associated with trade and engaging in this new globalized economy. And when they do get a new job, if they've lost their job, maybe it won't pay as much as their old job. And those are legitimate issues to deal with. Not only should we help with that because the right thing to do morally, but also because you want to get workers to the point where they're comfortable with what is going to be a much more competitive global economy. And that means helping figure out how to restructure the economy so that it works for the vast majority of Americans. And this is where, you know, policy can really do a lot. There are all kinds of creative ideas out there like wage insurance, which would allow you to basically create a floor of your wages if you get a new job and it pays less than your old job. Universal 401ks so that you can take your retirement security with you and you're not beholden to a particular job. And obviously universal health care, which, you know, we, we see as a real kind of foreign policy issue at the end of the day because it keeps Americans from going off and starting new entrepreneurial ventures because they're worried about keeping their health care benefits or they decide that they can't do particular things because they're going to lose their health care. And obviously it's eating into people economy, you know, into people's pocketbooks in a pretty significant way.

So just to pick up on that, in terms of innovation, there's been a lot of media attention to innovation moving abroad. And we think that in and of itself that's not a problem for the United States. That as more innovation happens abroad, individual companies might lose out on profits. But Americans as a whole are going to benefit if an Indian pharmaceutical company comes up with a cure for Alzheimer's. You know, good for them, and it's great for us as well. But the key is that America has to continue to innovate at home. And we're, you know, we're here right now, you know, in the heart of innovation country. We have to do better at growing our own scientists. We've been importing them from abroad, but it's getting trickier to do that in terms of our regulations. And also the places from which we're importing them are becoming more attractive places to stay or to return to. So we need to do better at that. There was just a recent study of teenagers across the, in 57 countries. And American teenagers are in this dubious category of being more confident in their science skills than the average teenager, but actually less skilled than the average. And, you know, out of a ranking of 57, America, depending on how you look, depending on, you know, what stats you use, falls between 25th and 37th. So it's really just appalling. And that includes all the industrialized democracies. At the end of the day, we really can't have foreign policy or economic policy based on the hope that poor countries will stay poor. It's not practical and it's not moral.

So the final question though is also is a little bit of a thorny one, which is how the pivotal powers affect our values, our way of life, democracy, human rights, that kind of Thing and certainly at home, unlike terrorists, which actually have caused us to rethink our civil liberties at home, we don't see that the pivotal powers present a threat to our ability to lead our way of life. Here in the United States the big question is, you know, what happens in our efforts to promote democracy around the world. And even here it's a mixed picture because on the one hand you have Japan, India and the eu, all liberal democracies, all great examples particularly of democracy in a non western context. But even China and Russia, you know, they are certainly not liberal democracies, nor are they going to be anytime soon. But neither are they trying to get have countries follow, neither are they trying to replicate their system of government around the world. So it's really fundamentally different than the Cold War when we really were in this ideological struggle about what form countries the nation should take. They basically agree we won the battle of ideas. They agree that capitalism is the best way to organize their economy. And, and you know, even they give lip service to the idea of democracy. And they of course understand the need to figure out how to deal with the massive interests of their, of their citizens as they figure out how to grow their economies at the same time. And so we certainly hate, don't like the way they treat their people, there's no question about that. And we need to continue to be very firm about what we think our values are and what they mean to us. But the reality is that as these powers become more influential, they can basically say we don't really care what you think. So just like when other countries complain about our use of the death penalty here, increasingly China and Russia are saying, yeah, well we don't really care what you think. And there are limited levers for us to force countries to do what we want them to do related to their own people. And obviously at the end of the day, part of the reason that countries follow the United States as a beacon is because we were living our values. We were the represent manifestation of liberal democracy with great values alive and well here. And so as in the past couple of years, we've moved away from those ideals. It makes it that much harder than to make the argument that somehow people should be following us. So you know, we did this analysis and we came to the conclusion after all of that that by and large the pivotal powers were important partners against the threats that are most challenging to us, that are the nearest and clearest present dangers to American lives. And at the end of the day, they're on our team in many ways. As long as we can get comfortable with the concept of change. And then I'll just talk about one chapter we have in here which I recommend, which a lot of people have read and they really like, which we did interviews across all of the pivotal powers with people in the countries, both thinkers, outside experts on the countries, but people in the powers themselves. And to really answer this question, well, doesn't China want to dominate the world and all of that? And we concluded that actually nobody's really trying to use our role as superpower. In fact, they're probably pretty confused, certainly in the Chinese case, about why it is we're hand wringing about them because they see us as all powerful. And so much further ahead, people are confused, let's just say, about what our ambitions are about and why we're concerned about the rise of these other powers. Although it is true that everybody wants more influence on the world stage, they want a bigger voice, a seat at the table, which is, you know, natural for a country that's going to be, you know, has more power. So I'll turn over to strategy.

So taking all of those conclusions into account, we came up with what we thought was the right strategy that the United States ought to use toward these pivotal powers. And we call this strategic collaboration. I'm just going to sum it up quickly. We think that the first and the most important step is to continue to invest at home in American strength. And that's sort of a surprise for a foreign policy book. We were surprised, but every time we were looking at a problem, we kept coming back to domestic policy, be it health care, education or, or on the climate crisis. Second, we need to develop very healthy and engaged bilateral relationships with each of these countries sort of separately. Third, we recommend that the next president bring all these big powers together around one table to discuss issues that we are all facing and that we all need to be part of the solution to. Right now, there is no such forum that exists in the world today. There are, you know, there are organizations where every country is a member. But we're looking for a small forum with just these six powers, which together represent half the world's, over half the world's population and 2/3 of its GDP. If we can get these powers on the same side to tackle non proliferation or to have a new push for climate change, we can actually really make some important progress.

And the final piece of our strategy is hedging. Because while no pivotal power today wants to threaten the United States and has no intent to do so, right now, you don't know what's going to happen in the future. And so we think it's prudent to prepare for, you know, what could turn out to be an aggressive power down the road, who knows how far down the path. And there are a bunch of elements to this hedging strategy we won't go through, but quickly. There are two that we that are most important. One is dedicating resources to really understand what these powers are about, what makes them tick, what motivates them, what's going on on in their domestic politics that could turn them pivot away and become more aggressive. And then the second is to keep investing in our military, in cutting edge technologies and continue to have a forward deployed military not targeted at any power, but targeted at potential outcomes so that we are prepared in case things take a turn for the worse. And then at the end of the book, we really argue that the time to implement this strategy is now. We are at a point, obviously a big election is looming. This is a natural moment for the country to make this really fundamental pivot. We still have a huge advantage in the world's institutions. We're still the biggest power by a nice margin. Importantly, the other powers still want us to have a seat at the table, and they want a seat at the table too. It may not always be that way. So we feel like we have this moment of opportunity where kind of all of our interests are aligned at the highest level and we ought to take advantage of that to go ahead and try to loop them into the system. But implementing the strategy. Do you want to talk about that? Sure. Yeah.

To implement this strategy is going to take a different kind of leadership than the United States has shown to date. We have to encourage all the pivotal powers to play and also to pay for a seat at the table. We can't dictate the answers, we have to listen. But we cannot disengage either. We need both American leadership and pivotal power engagement to actually solve any of these major world problems. We have to leave at the destructive doctrine of primacy behind the doors when they close on this administration. The idea that the United States has to stay a fixed huge margin ahead of all the other pivotal powers and has not made us any safer. It hasn't stabilized Afghanistan, it hasn't brought democracy to Iraq, it hasn't routed Al Qaeda, it hasn't denuclearized North Korea. We need the help of other countries to do these things. And insistence on primacy, insistence that we have to always be the strongest by a set margin, makes that kind of cooperation all the harder. To our surprise, Americans seem more than ready, actually, to make this turn. We looked at a lot of polling from many decades, all different organizations, and we found that Americans are actually very willing to share leadership. That. That's. That's their sort of natural instinct. And if you. We looked at one poll that said it was in 2006, and 75% of Americans said that the US should do its share to solve international problems together with other countries. And the respondents in that poll rejected the idea that we should solve them on our own and rejected the idea that we should withdraw and try not to solve them at all.

So that begged the question when we said, okay, because we had kind of assumed, I think, that there would be this natural kind of, who knows, Americans in the heartland who are like, we have to be number one. But it turned out, if that's not really true, so then what is the problem? Right? And we basically centered on two problems. One is our political system, surprise, surprise. And the other one is the media, which likes a good fight and wants to keep, you know, obviously the drama of international, you know, an up and coming, a rising person, all the competition, it plays right into the hands of all of our television shows and everything else about our culture. But on the political system, you know, we have a lot of ideas in the book for kind of little ideas that can start to change the way the political process works. But we do have to get to a point where right now, the political leadership in this country is convinced that the rest of the country is not interested in engaging with the rest of the world in this productive kind of sharing power kind of way. And so we have a bunch of recommendations in the book about how to get them to understand that more clearly. And polling really shows this, that there's, you know, the staffers, Hill staffers are surprisingly, will miscalculate every time and will say, oh, Americans would never agree to the Kyoto Protocol or whatever it is, even though the vast majority of Americans really would. So there is this gap there that we've been trying to figure out exactly why it's there and how to close it. And so, you know, the final chapter of the book, you know, kind of goes through basically the optimism, optimistic part of our message, which is that, you know, we have been through lots of ups and downs in this country. Just in the early 1990s, there were lots of books out about how the United States was going to fall apart tomorrow because Japan had figured everything out. We were dead in the water. We were in a recession. Life was horrible. And then we turned around on a dime and had, you know, 15 years of fantastic growth and lots of innovation in our economy. So we came away feeling actually really optimistic about America's future, which is not, by the way, necessarily where we thought we would end up, although we did believe that we couldn't just naturally fall down the same Cold War path where it's a zero sum assumption about other powers rising and that's automatically bad for the United States. And after our analysis, we came to the conclusion that that optimistic message seems right and that we should just move forward and do this now so that we do, we can prosper long term.

We ended our book with, as all good foreign policy books with an analogy to Tiger woods, who, you know, was at the height of his career in 1997, was the youngest ever to be ranked number one, had just won the Masters by some record margin, and I'm not a golf player, and I was completely transfixed. And then he takes a year off to. To retool his swing, and everybody was just absolutely amazed, like, how can you be at the height of your power and then just take a year off to redo the very thing that had made you great to begin with? And then he did the same exact thing in 2004, again, stunning everybody. So basically, that's what America needs to do. We need to, while we have so many advantages and so many strengths, and we need to reinvest in them so that we can prosper long into the future.

And with that, we'll take questions.

How.

I mean, the message in this book is, again, I didn't know what most of America was probably thinking. I assumed that I didn't have, you know, that I mirrored a lot of the things you'd found and that I wanted the world to be kind of a place with a lot of superpowers. But again, like, I listen to the media more than anything else. I don't have any other resource to figure out, what is someone in Alabama thinking? What is someone in South Carolina thinking? And unfortunately, you know, you convey this information to us in a book, which is a medium that not a lot of people use. So is there any other way you're planning on telling everyone, essentially, it's okay. That might kind of penetrate through the general apathy or kind of cloudedness with which most Americans get their information?

Well, I mean, we are. Yeah, we're on this book tour. I mean, we're trying to do radio and TV and, you know, but blogging. And blogging. I mean, we're trying, you know, in every way that we can think of. It's amazingly hard to penetrate. You know, I was just saying to Michael earlier, I mean, the two of us are, you know, at it full time, and we're still kind of. It's very hard to gain traction and to get any kind of momentum, especially when you're saying something that is so counter to the typical argument. I mean, a lot of people don't even hear our argument the first time around because it's so contrary to their general mindset.

And it's probably antagonistic to a lot of the places that certain power structures get their power, which is, my group says this. You know, my majority says this, and this is how I can get legislation pushed and things done. So it's kind of countering their infrastructure.

Yeah. I mean, the reality is, from a policy perspective, the extremes rule the middle. Right? You have. The extremes are highly organized and very vocal. And, you know, I mean, people find this amazing. But when you work in Washington, I mean, people count these congressional offices, they count how many letters and emails and phone calls they get. And when you call, you say, well, how can you be against something that, you know, everybody, the vast majority of Americans are for? And they'll say, Well, I got 300 calls against it and only two for it. Right. So that's what I've got. And that reflects my constituency. Not, of course, the fact that everybody else is at work. Right. They don't have time to. It's like, we're busy. So part of it is, I think it's amazing, this explosion of communication that has been a fantastic thing, but figuring out how to get it channeled so that people can take their very busy lives and still have a voice. Not a voice. I mean, I love blogging, but it's a voice, you know, it happens in a bubble. Right, but how do you then channel that into something that can turn into action? That's. Well, work on it. Google.

Work on it. I was going to say, if you.

Have any ideas, figure it out.

You should be telling us, you know, the better medium.

Just on that topic, I hope to answer that question. You don't have to answer that question.

This will also be on YouTube, so you can send it out to all your friends. A little easier to digest.

Thanks for coming. I came a little bit late, so please stop me if you've already addressed this, but you mentioned China and India and those countries and others are going to have to overcome the massive inequalities in their countries that dwarf the ones that we have to face. And in doing so, I think they're going to have to decide how to navigate the, you know, climate change. For example, navigate carbon emissions versus letting everyone have a car.

Right.

The Tata Nano that just came out for $2,000 an example. So I'm wondering, what tools does the United States actually have when we get them to the bargaining table to get them to consider the externalities of their actions, when they are providing, when they do have to respond to their own constituencies at home?

I mean, I think the best tool that we have is their own self interest and their own political viability. I mean, in China there are a lot of protests that happen over environmental issues. So, you know, that's number one. Number two, I mean, the coastal regions in all these countries are going to be deeply affected. So they are, at the end of the day, very pragmatic. And so they see it coming down the pike, you know, as well as we do. And they have much, it's going to be much harder for them. And they have already dramatic shortages of clean water in both India and China. So it's in their self interest to try to do something about it. What we can't do though, is preach at them and say, you know, oh my God, China, you're about to overtake us as the world's largest carbon emitter when we've had that mantle for generations and when all the carbon in the atmosphere, 80% of it is ours, you know, we have to really take a very serious stab at transforming to a low carbon economy before we can ever expect them to do anything.

And it's also that, you know, I agree which, with the incentives, which is, you know, the reality is, of course they're saying, well, we deserve to have a car. I mean, we had an Indian participant at this conference that we were at and he said, you know, I hear you guys are constantly going wah, wah to the Indians about the, about the, you know, the Nano, the Tata's car. He said, and everybody's driving SUVs in the United States. You drive, he said, you literally are driving buses down the street. You realize many, he said it's the equivalent of a public sector bus, is the size of most cars in the United States. And he said, do you see how ridiculous it is for you to sit and have a conversation with us seriously about our carbon? And you know, it's a legitimate point, obviously. So I think we, but there is, I also think that there's a big role for technology here because one of the, this is one of these Areas where there's a confluence of factors and self interest that could drive us to a really great 10,000 foot solution because of high oil prices, climate change, instability in the Middle east, and the fact that all of our economies all need energy and we all need it cheaply, ideally. And so there is the make, there are all the building blocks there of a really good grand bargain. Somehow that also involves technology because they will use cheaper, they will use cheaper energy if we can figure out how to get them cheaper energy. It's just we can't tell them, well, you know, build this kind of power plant that costs, you know, a ridiculous amount of money that they can't afford. So, you know, there's room there though for, I think, a great solution. In the end, it just was going to take a lot of leadership and creativity.

Just one last thing on that, we start our book with a little anecdote about this project called iter, which all these big powers are a part of NS as well, which is trying to convert, use nuclear fusion to convert seawater to energy with no, you know, no harmful residue and all that. So there is a precedent for getting everybody together on the same page to try to push forward in energy.

In energy.

I have a question. Out of all of the presidential candidates, without necessarily explicitly endorsing one, are there any that maybe are more aligned with your thinking currently in terms of foreign policy and kind of the optimistic way of looking at other countries as partners?

Well, first we have to be totally straight with everybody, which is that we're each helping different Democratic candidates. So we, you know, so we're biased. But I think it's fair to say that I think that the Democratic slate, I think for the most part is really forward thinking about all these things. I'm biased because I'm helping Obama, so I think he's little bit better at it. But I'm sure she thinks that Nina, I'm sure Nina thinks that Hillary is just as good. So it's fine. But my thing is that I think Democrats in this country recognize that we have to make a fundamental pivot in the way that we've been doing business that everybody gets. And they know that we have to do something on this climate crisis and they know that we have to do something to restore our respect and credibility around the world and kind of live by our values. So we're kind of everybody's squabbling, we're squabbling. The Democrats are squabbling on the margins because those basic building blocks everybody agrees on. And so I think you know, there will be differences in the way people approach it or how they think about it and the way they think about our place in the world. But I think substantively, you're not going to see a lot of difference there.

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I think in particular with Obama and with Clinton, I think they are both pretty much on our page, both wanting to bring the world in and forge consensus and all that. That's basically both of their approaches.

And we'd just like to thank Mona and Nino one more time for coming to San Francisco.