Scott Morrison’s upcoming state dinner with Donald Trump in the White House offers a rare opportunity for both leaders to explore ambitious and creative options for the future of US–Australia relations.

This month’s AUSMIN meeting established a strong foundation for future cooperation, with some important new areas of focus—notably, critical minerals, energy and space, and deeper engagement with Southeast Asia. It has also underlined the value of continuing cooperation on maritime security in the Indo-Pacific, implementing the Pacific step-up and countering Islamic State terrorism.

There are two areas, though, in which the prime minister and president might push things beyond their respective bureaucracies’ comfort zones—and that sort of forward-leaning approach would be a healthy thing. Leaders don’t travel intercontinental distances merely to share a nice meal and rehearse earlier agreements.

First, there’s defence cooperation. The US Force Posture Initiatives are going well. They include the deployment of 2,500 marines in Darwin, enhanced cooperation by the Australian Defence Force and the US military in Southeast Asia, and the rotation of US fighter and bomber aircraft through the north, with co-investments by Australia and the US in the facilities to enable these efforts.

A new, imaginative step is needed—and it should be one that accelerates achievement of the Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy through a more mobile, dispersed US force in the region, while also increasing Australian military power.

Projecting US and Australian naval power from a new set of facilities at the Stirling base near Perth would reset the maritime security agenda in a big, positive way. A major reinvestment well beyond current Australian plans, with some US co-investment, would have a strategic effect beyond previous administrations’ efforts. What’s needed are facilities to support two or more major US naval vessels on permanent rotation alongside Australia’s growing west coast fleet.

US naval forces would have a place to operate from that’s logistically secure and gives them options beyond their bases in Guam, Hawaii and Diego Garcia. And the Australian navy would achieve the growing room it will need in future as well as having their highest-end partner navy right there to train and operate with.

It would be a key part of getting ahead of the growing Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean and complicate Chinese military planning and projects under the Belt and Road Initiative that are designed to support Chinese forces. It would also provide a platform to accelerate Quad naval cooperation with India and Japan. Combined with the investment by Papua New Guinea, the US and Australia in upgrading the Lombrum base, the WA idea would re-establish US and allied initiative in the Indo-Pacific.

Second, there’s an urgent need to change perceptions on a key issue that will shape everything about the US–Australia partnership for decades to come. Too many commentators—including business leaders—have signed up to the narrative that America is Australia’s security partner, but China is Australia’s economic partner. That’s lazy thinking, and untrue.

Australia’s engagement with the Chinese economy is a trade-based one, and China is indeed our largest trading partner. Our two-way trade was worth some $215 billion in 2018. But China (including Hong Kong) is our fifth-largest source of foreign investment (some $182 billion) after Belgium. The US, by contrast, is our third-largest trading partner (at $74 billion in 2018) but our largest source of foreign investment by far—its $939 billion is followed by second-placed UK at $575 billion. On the flip side, Australian investment into China (including Hong Kong) is a healthy $128 billion, but our investment into the US is more than five times that, at $719 billion.

Statistics won’t win hearts and minds, though. The real opportunity for Trump and Morrison is to show both nations’ peoples and business communities that the US–Australia alliance is an economic one and a strategic one. That means prioritising economic cooperation and then empowering our business leaders to take advantage of those opportunities through policy and regulatory incentives. That’s good economics and good security.

The most obvious priority area for two-way investment is infrastructure renewal. Trump won office promising a huge package to refresh ageing American roads, rail, ports and other critical infrastructure. He’s yet to get a package together and is likely to continue to have difficulty with Congress and with finding the budgetary room for the spending required.

Well, Australia can help. We’re the world’s 13th-largest economy, but we have outsized economic power in our superannuation industry. Our super assets are valued at US$1.9 trillion—the fourth-largest pension assets pool on the planet. Australian pension funds need stable, high-quality returns—and investing to renew the infrastructure that underpins the continued dynamism of the world’s largest economy is a massive opportunity to achieve that.

Whatever the glories of the US–Australia free-trade agreement, Trump and Morrison can supercharge Australian investment in US infrastructure by insisting that their administrations find new incentives and strip back regulatory processes. An infrastructure investment summit with business and government representatives would be a logical first step. Businesses make investment decisions, but governments must lead and create the environment for investment—by reducing regulatory obstacles and giving favourable taxation treatment and investment incentives.

Australia, in turn, can benefit from enhanced US investment in our own critical infrastructure. The Foreign Investment Review Board’s reform to include national security factors more prominently in its approval process shows the way forward. It has led to decisions to reject Chinese entities’ bids in critical areas like electricity networks and east coast gas distribution, where national security is a key element. Applying this logic—and recognising that both security and economics are key to evaluating competing foreign investment bids—US proposals would benefit from a positive national security assessment.

None of this is intended to devalue the AUSMIN package of future cooperation. But if Trump and Morrison want to establish their own agenda for the US–Australia relationship, they can do so by creating a joint Indo-Pacific naval hub on Australia’s west coast and by supercharging two-way investment in each nation’s critical and digital infrastructure. That would portray a forward-leaning alliance ready to address the challenges of a new era.

They say timing is everything. This week I’ve been devouring the United States Studies Centre’s excellent new report, Averting crisis: American strategy, military spending and collective defence in the Indo-Pacific. It makes a convincing argument that in the face of an overwhelming threat posed by a rising and assertive China, the US is ill-prepared to meet the prospect of prolonged strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific.

Part of the reason for this ‘crisis of strategic insolvency’ is operational and resource overstretch. Two decades of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations in the Middle East, combined with insufficient defence funding, has led to an ageing and atrophying US military. Now, with tensions running high between the US and Iran, there’s a risk that, rather than getting out of its Middle East commitments and focusing on capability development and operational readiness for a possible conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific, the US could be sucked into another Middle East quagmire that could be far more costly and lengthy than either Iraq or Afghanistan.

As a key US ally, Australia faces tough choices in prioritising its capability development and operational deployment decisions. So, the announcement by the Morrison government that Australia will send military assets and personnel to the Persian Gulf region to ensure freedom of navigation and protect vital shipping lanes, alongside the US and other allies, is important to consider in the broader context of our need to shift our operational priorities to focus on the Indo-Pacific.

The new deployment is not huge in scale or scope. Australia’s contribution will occur under Operation Manitou, which is the current name for the Australian government’s longstanding support for maritime security, stability and prosperity in the Middle East. The program has been going on, in one form or another, since before the 1991 Gulf War.

This new Australian deployment will be limited in scale and duration. It will consist of a single RAAF P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft with a crew of 10 for a month before the end of this year; a RAN frigate with 177 crew for six months in early 2020; and a contingent of ADF personnel to be based in Bahrain to help coordinate with allies.

The government’s stated rationale for this decision is two-fold: safeguarding oil and gas supplies and preserving the rules-based international order. The concern is that any disruption to commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz by Iran, or its partners, could imperil Australia’s access to critical energy resources. In making the announcement, the prime minister noted that, ‘Fifteen to 16 per cent of crude oil and 25 to 30 per cent of refined oil destined for Australia transits through the Strait of Hormuz. So it’s a potential threat to our economy.’

Had the Morrison government, or, for that matter, previous governments, taken energy security seriously, the risks to Australia would not have been so great. The reality is that we’re woefully underprepared for a disruption to fuel supplies. Successive governments, both Coalition and Labor, have consistently ignored their international obligations to have at least a 90-day supply of fuel—we currently have just 28 days.

Now, with the risk of an interruption to commercial shipping and thus potentially to our energy supplies, the government has to act. Ensuring the uninterrupted flow of vital energy and fuel resources through the Strait of Hormuz demands Australia step up to that task rather than rely on others to carry the burden.

Related to the issue of energy security is the importance of maintaining our alliance with the US. With the prime minister heading off to Washington next month for meetings with President Donald Trump and other key figures in his administration, the strength of the alliance is uppermost in the minds of policy thinkers.

There are many ways we can achieve that goal. Following the recent AUSMIN dialogue, the government saw fit to silence any discussion of basing US medium-range missiles in northern Australia. This was in spite of the obvious benefits that Australia’s vast north offers for basing mobile launchers compared with Guam or Okinawa. Although the 4,000-kilometre-range ballistic missile currently under development by the US can’t reach China from Australia, a recent report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments noted that it could reach Chinese bases in the South China Sea if it were based in the Northern Territory.

For now, we have made the commitment to deploy additional forces to the Persian Gulf. And that sends a strong signal to Washington that we are not a ‘free-loader’ and we will share the burden with our most important ally in pursuit of common interests.

That’s all well and good. But if things go badly in the Middle East, and shots are fired, drawing the US and others into prolonged conflict against Iran, Australia would likely be drawn in as well.

The scope and duration of ADF deployments could then rapidly expand, which would consume our resources and attention, diverting us away from the most important challenge, which is, of course, China. It’s the very essence of the problem that the USSC report highlights.

Of all the changes in US foreign policy that President Donald Trump’s administration has made, the most consequential is the adoption of a confrontational stance towards China. Replacing a decades-old policy of engagement, Trump’s approach has not only resulted in an economic cold war between the world’s two largest economies; it has also raised the spectre of armed conflict in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

Within the first year of his presidency, Trump labelled China a strategic ‘competitor’ and ‘rival power’. But it’s not just Trump: for the US national security establishment and leading Republican members of Congress—as well as some Democrats—China represents the most serious long-term threat to America’s global pre-eminence and vital interests.

Geopolitics has been the primary cause of the rapid deterioration of US–China relations over the past two years, and Trump’s trade war must be viewed in this context. US tariffs may be focused on undermining China’s long-term economic potential, but the underlying motivation is to weaken China as a strategic rival.

This should be clear from the fact that, despite Trump’s economic justifications—protection of US businesses’ intellectual property and correction of the huge bilateral trade imbalance—his tariffs are likely to do serious harm to the US economy, as they unravel an economic relationship built over four decades. In substance, if not in name, America’s China policy has become entirely adversarial.

This shift has alarmed some of America’s most experienced China scholars and former policymakers. In an open letter, nearly 100 of them—including both Republicans and Democrats, and many vocal critics of Chinese policies and behaviour—recently called on Trump not to treat China as an enemy.

The American public seems largely to agree. There is, to be sure, widespread antipathy towards China throughout the United States: according to the Pew Research Center’s most recent survey on the matter (conducted in August 2018), only 38% of Americans view China favorably, while 47% view it unfavorably. But only 29% of respondents cited China’s military might as a cause for concern. A much larger share— 58%—are worried about its economic prowess. This suggests that, in the eyes of most Americans, the primary objective of relations with China should be to protect their livelihoods, not to initiate a geopolitical confrontation.

Yet a geopolitical confrontation seems to be precisely what the Trump administration is engineering—possibly at the expense of many Americans’ livelihoods. This disconnect reflects the extent to which the shift in America’s China policy has occurred out of the public’s view and without open debate.

Such a debate is urgently needed. Though the trade war has been dominating headlines since it began, much of the American public is unaware of the extent of the transformation in US policy towards China, which exposes their country to an open-ended conflict with what will soon be the world’s largest economy and its leading emerging power.

In a democracy, a government cannot pursue a long-term struggle with a powerful geopolitical adversary without sustained political support from an informed public. Special attention should be paid to young people (who, according to Pew, have a significantly more favourable view of China than their elders do), because they will bear the brunt of the costs of the unfolding Sino-American cold war.

For such a debate to be credible, the Trump administration will need to answer crucial questions about its China policy. First and foremost, what is the policy’s ultimate objective? Possible answers include modification of certain Chinese behaviours or policies, containment of Chinese economic or military might, or outright regime change.

The Trump administration would then have to explain how it intends to achieve its stated objective. Is ‘economic decoupling’, favoured by the China hawks in Trump’s orbit, an effective or feasible strategy? The authors of the open letter argue that US efforts to decouple China from the global economy ‘will damage [America’s] international role and reputation, and undermine the economic interests of all nations’. And could other countries—even traditional US allies—be convinced to support those efforts? Would the US be willing (or able) to go it alone?

Whichever policy it chooses, the Trump administration must be able to justify it. Last October, Vice President Mike Pence effectively declared ‘cold war’ on China in a blistering speech that contained a litany of accusations, including interference in US politics and oppression of its own people. What Pence—and the rest of the Trump administration—didn’t offer was a reasoned justification for America’s treatment of China as an existential threat.

The final question that must be asked concerns multilateral cooperation. To confront shared challenges—some of which, like climate change and nuclear proliferation, actually are existential threats—the world needs such cooperation more than ever. Can the US embrace a policy of confrontation towards China without precluding collaboration on issues where it is required?

The signatories of the open letter—as well as a slew of renowned economists, politicians and thinkers—have presented an informed and thoughtful statement of their collective views on China. The Trump administration must illuminate its own vision and goals to the people it is supposed to represent.

Kim Jong-un’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok in late April demonstrated conclusively that the North Korean leader has no intention of retreating from the international stage after February’s ill-fated summit with US President Donald Trump in Hanoi. Over the past 12 months, Kim has held at least one leadership summit with each of the region’s major powers—with the notable exception of Japan.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe claimed as recently as March 2018 that ‘talks for the sake of talks are meaningless’ when it comes to North Korea. But in a stark reversal, Tokyo has dropped its preconditions for a summit with Kim, a shift that reflects the uncertain yet sustained openness to dialogue that’s arisen in the region. Abe now says that the two leaders need to meet in person to ‘break the current mutual mistrust’.

Several unresolved issues between Pyongyang and Tokyo have contributed to the two leaders’ reluctance to meet in recent years. On the Japanese side, chief among these is the controversial abduction issue. Resolving the case of the Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s has long been championed as a foreign policy priority by Abe. Japan was also angered in 2017 by North Korea’s repeated shooting of short- and medium-range missiles around and over Japanese territory.

Tokyo has failed to endear itself to Pyongyang by continuing to be a staunch advocate of ‘maximum pressure’—and by playing a leading role in monitoring North Korea’s illicit ship-to-ship transfers. Since early 2018, North Korea’s state-run media outlets have regularly denounced Japan, even as their criticism of other major powers has at times become less strident.

The last round of bilateral negotiations between Japan and North Korea commenced in 2002 and fell apart in early 2016 when Pyongyang embarked on a new round of nuclear and missile tests. Tokyo has since attempted to get the abduction issue onto the agendas of both US–North Korea summits, but that approach has failed to lead to observable diplomatic progress.

Recognising that its own unique national interests are stake, Tokyo has slowly begun signalling a softer approach in an attempt to create the conditions for its own bilateral summit with Pyongyang. Notably, the Abe administration dropped the term ‘maximum pressure’ from its most recent annual foreign policy report, known as the ‘diplomatic bluebook’. It also, for the first time in more than a decade, declined to submit an annual motion to the UN condemning North Korean human rights abuses.

While the fundamentals in the relationship between North Korea and Japan haven’t changed, there are two key factors behind Abe’s decision to drop conditions for meeting Kim. The first is Tokyo’s and Washington’s diverging interests on North Korean issues. During the ‘fire and fury’ days of 2017, Abe and Trump met frequently, reaffirming their shared hardline approach to dealing with North Korea. After the president’s shift to diplomacy with Kim in 2018, the Abe administration publicly supported dialogue with Pyongyang but also warned against trusting North Korea, holding firm to its policy of maintaining maximum pressure.

In the year since the Singapore summit, however, it’s become clear that the US hasn’t been an effective spokesperson for Japan. By all accounts, Trump has avoided discussions of human rights topics in his meetings with the North Korean leader, making it difficult for Tokyo to effectively deal with the abduction issue through its US ally. During the recent Abe–Trump summit in Japan, Trump met with the families of some of the abductees, and Abe informed the press that the president had told him he would ‘spare no effort’ to help resolve the matter. Despite those assurances, there’s been a growing appreciation in Tokyo that the diplomatic support of the US won’t be anywhere near enough, on its own, to produce a breakthrough.

Nor has much progress been made on halting the development of North Korea’s nuclear or missile programs. Washington remains more focused on addressing its own vulnerabilities to Pyongyang’s long-range missiles than on dealing with the short- and medium-range missiles that currently threaten Japanese territory. Tokyo has likely calculated that Trump is determined to strike a deal with Kim and will once again cast Tokyo’s interests aside.

The other factor is related to internal politics in Japan. The timing of the latest move towards a summit with North Korea is advantageous for Abe. With parliamentary elections expected at least once in the next few months, Abe could use foreign policy issues to bolster his party’s position. And he has certainly built up enough capital as a hardliner over the past nine years to give himself space to propose an unconditional meeting with the North Korean leader without risking being depicted as weak by his domestic opponents.

Unfortunately for Abe, the decision to hold a summit isn’t his alone, and it’s quite possible that Kim will continue to decline Tokyo’s entreaties to meet. Kim would arguably accrue some additional prestige and status by ‘completing the set’ of summits with Northeast Asia’s leaders, but he may decide that he has more to gain by continuing to portray Japan as the natural enemy of the North Korean people. After all, Japan can’t offer anything to North Korea it can’t get from China, Russia, South Korea or the United States.

The massive financial benefits and diplomatic recognition that Pyongyang might hope for in return for resolving the abduction issue are unlikely to be forthcoming from Tokyo unless progress is made on curtailing North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. Moreover, a summit with the Japanese leader would almost certainly lead to additional international coverage of the abductee issue—a particularly regrettable part of the Kim dynasty’s legacy. Even a successful resolution of the matter could well provoke more anger towards Pyongyang in Japan and across the world than it does bonhomie. As long as Kim maintains his relationship with Trump and moves towards economic cooperation with China, Russia and South Korea, Kim is in a position to decline involvement from Japan.

Ultimately, now that the leaders of China, the US, South Korea and Russia have all met with Kim and advocated dialogue, and there have been no serious plans to revive multilateral diplomacy à la the long-defunct six-party talks, it has become increasingly difficult for Japan to make its voice heard on peninsula issues. Unless Kim breaks from his current stance, it appears that this isolation could continue for some time.

Welcome to ‘The Strategist Six’, a feature that provides a glimpse into the thinking of prominent academics, government officials, military officers, reporters and interesting individuals from around the world.

1. British Prime Minister Theresa May has now lost a range of symbolic and substantive parliamentary votes on Brexit. At the same time, Europe is sticking to the line that it won’t reopen the text of the withdrawal deal. Do the prime minister’s challenges today stem mainly from Westminster or Brussels?

It’s a combination of the two and the interaction between the two. For a long period the prime minister was focused on getting a deal from Brussels and maybe wasn’t able to concentrate on what Tory MPs would find acceptable. That approach ran into problems and now she’s trying to find some mid-way point. Although she denies it, her policy is about running down the clock and then facing the Tories with the prospect that they could lose Brexit altogether if they don’t accept something very close to the deal that they previously rejected. I think it might well work—we’ll find out in the next month or so.

2. With the various options for ‘how to Brexit’ having been given a good public airing, do you think that the British people should be given an opportunity not only to reconfirm their desire to leave the EU, but also to nominate how the country forges ahead with that intention?

Remainers tend to be the ones who want a second referendum. I voted ‘remain’ and part of me wants a second referendum, because I don’t think it has worked out the way it was sold. In fact the ‘leave’ campaign was quite deliberate in being very unspecific about what Brexit would actually look like; they basically said, ‘It’ll be fine.’ Over the last two years the British people have discovered that a lot of the claims made for Brexit were wishful thinking at best. But I’m genuinely divided. While I’ve written that we should take May’s deal, I find that whenever that deal comes close to fruition I feel depressed because I don’t actually want to leave the EU. So, intellectually, I’m in one place; emotionally, I’m in another.

I personally don’t have a problem with a second referendum, and I think it’s likely that Britain would vote to stay this time—certainly opinion polls for the last few months have shown a narrow ‘remain’ majority. But I don’t say it with much joy or confidence, because I think it would be a highly divisive move and would play into the narrative of the leavers, who have always said, ‘This is an elite conspiracy which shows remainers aren’t interested in what the people have to say.’

So if you were to turn around and reverse Brexit—even by perfectly legitimate democratic means—there’s a risk of political disillusionment tipping into something that’s quite corrosive for British democracy. Leaving the EU will really be damaging both for the British economy and for Britain’s clout in the world. But equally, it’s not obvious that endangering the UK’s traditional political stability in favour of staying inside the EU is the right trade-off.

3. In the long term, is the goal of a ‘global Britain’ made more or less likely by Brexit?

I think it’s a pretty empty slogan. Britain is already global in the sense that it’s a global trading economy with international interests and with—perhaps as a legacy of empire—an unusually wide network stretching all the way to Australia and the Pacific. I think the slogan meant to convey that Britain had become locked into a European mentality and set of markets, and that we should reorient ourselves to the dynamic, emerging markets of the world—particularly those in Asia. The trouble is that it’s a false choice. I don’t think that being a member of the EU prevents the UK from taking advantage of such opportunities. Arguably it makes it easier: the EU has just signed a big trade deal with Japan, and it also has a deal with South Korea. Britain as a global hub is much more attractive inside the EU than outside of it, so the danger is that Brexit makes us less global, not more.

4. You wrote recently that the ‘era of populists’ could last decades if nationalist governments deliver tangible results. Two years in, how successful has US President Donald Trump been in ensuring that those who elected him feel he has improved their lives and arrested their sense of relative American decline?

It depends on who you speak to. America at the moment is so divided along partisan lines that nobody is really shifting their position, sort of like Brexit. So Trump’s supporters, unless they’re directly affected by an event, be it a factory closure or whatever, will tend to say, ‘Yeah, he’s going well.’ His opponents don’t see it that way.

There hasn’t yet been that defining event that will fix in people’s minds whether Trump is seen as a success or a failure. Jimmy Carter’s failure to respond effectively to the occupation of the US embassy in Iran, combined with the second oil shock and Carter’s own demeanour, created the sense that his was a failed presidency—even though he lost quite narrowly in the end. For Ronald Reagan, there was the resurgence of the American economy, the invasion of Grenada oddly enough, and a few other things that created momentum and led to his being seen as a success. But Trump isn’t yet fixed in people’s minds as a success or failure, and maybe it won’t happen anymore because America is so divided. Barack Obama’s supporters see him as the greatest president ever, while his opponents still detest him.

5. What is your view of Chinese President Xi Jinping—his premiership, his agenda, his authority, his grip on power?

Pretty negative, to be honest. I think he’s been very bad news for China. You don’t have to embrace the naive idea that China should move instantly to one person, one vote and a full liberal democracy; I have some sympathy for the argument that you have to play that carefully. But Xi is moving China backwards in the sense that the cult of personality is very retrograde. It is infantilising for what are very sophisticated people. This isn’t the Cultural Revolution generation who were cut off from the outside world; these are people who are well educated and know the world yet have to follow this line.

I don’t claim to know China very well, but I have been going every now and then for quite a while. It seems to me that the scope for debate—what intellectuals are prepared to talk about in public or in private—has narrowed. People are scared now in a way that they weren’t five years ago. In fact, I remember five years ago going out for dinner in Beijing with a bunch of professors from the top Chinese universities who were prepared to have a very lively discussion in a restaurant about whether China should aspire to be a democracy. I just don’t think they would do that anymore.

My impression is that there’s a climate of fear now under Xi, and it’s not just about politics but it’s also about business because of the anti-corruption drive. Now, obviously the system was deeply corrupt, but the sense now that anybody’s vulnerable is destabilising. It’s very worrying for China and for the world.

6. Are you pessimistic or optimistic about the state of global affairs in 2019?

I’m not terribly optimistic and the reasons are fairly clear. If you’re of a ‘liberal’ disposition both in economics and in politics, we had a very good 30 years from 1978—the opening of China, and Thatcher and Reagan reinvigorating the West. That was followed by democratisation, which is commonly and understandably associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Things were going in the right direction.

We also saw state control of the economy going out of fashion and it seemed there was a formula that worked and was going global—a combination of political and economic freedoms advancing. But, significantly, 1989 was the year not only of the Berlin Wall but also of Tiananmen Square, where China didn’t take the same route yet it has since been successful beyond anyone’s imagining, despite being a one-party state.

Then the Western system had its own seismic economic shock in 2008 from which we never fully recovered, and in the aftermath we’ve had a rise of illiberal politics, which Donald Trump exemplifies in the West. But it’s not just Trump. If you look across Europe, the AfD is the official opposition in the German parliament, Brexit is here in the UK, France has the gilet jaunes, Spain is threatening to break up, democracy is under threat in Poland and Hungary, Russia has gone backwards to become a menacing player in the international system. And strongman politics is back in fashion, not just in China but even in India, the Philippines and Brazil, and along with it a rise in economic nationalism, which is potentially dangerous.

So no, I don’t think it’s a particularly great period. The question is how long it will last. The other thing that makes me anxious is actually the environment. The sense that we’ve failed on climate change, that the goals aren’t realistic or probably enough in themselves. And with things like species extinction and so on—I see you had one in Australia very recently—it’s very alarming.

The only thing I would say, though, is that one can misread these things. I was actually talking to my mother about it recently—when I was born in ’63 she had a strong sense that I had come into a world gone wrong because the Cuban missile crisis happened just a year before, everyone was terrified of nuclear Armageddon around the corner and things looked very dangerous. And yet, I’ve lived in a very blessed era of peace, prosperity, steadily expanding freedom and reduction of poverty around the world. So you can have a snapshot of a time and think, ‘Oh well, it’s obviously terrible.’ But we may be wrong. I hope so!