#215 — A Conversation with David Miliband
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Summary
David Miliband is the President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, the largest refugee resettlement agency in the United States, and a former British politician who served as Prime Minister, Education Minister and Foreign Minister. In this episode, he talks about how he got into politics, why he joined the ICRC, and why he decided to become a refugee. He also talks about his family history and how he became a refugee himself, and how that led him to a career in politics and international affairs. He also explains why he chose to leave his job as a politician to become the CEO of an organisation that helps refugees and internally displaced people around the world, and what it was like growing up in a British family with a British accent. He talks about the challenges he faced as a child growing up as a refugee, and the lessons he learned from his parents, both of whom were refugees themselves. This episode was produced by Sam Harris and edited by Alex Blumberg. It was edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and edited and produced by Emma Rainey. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and Matthew Boll. Our ad music was provided by Mark Phillips and Mark Phillips, and our ad design was done by Ian McKirdy, with additional mixing and mastering by Matthew Boll, and additional mixing by Matthew Crowell, and music engineering by Matthew Barnard, and mixed by Matthew Cradock, and mastering and mastering the music was by Matthew Karnacz, and editing by Ben Kavanagh, and his excellent mixing skills by James Callow, and Alex Blanchflower, and sound design by Rachel Ward, and production assistance by Matthew Stacey, and their excellent editing and mastering assistance by James Mee, and also a very good sound design and editing assistance by Jonathan Meegan, and Bobby Lord, and an excellent sound design, by the excellent Annie-Jane Shaw, and so on, and finally finally got it all transcribing it on a good sound editing by Jack Williams, and we got it on for you, the excellent sound effects by the amazing sound effects and mastering it on this amazing mixing and editing and editing at the excellent editing by Matthew Coughlansey, and all thanks to the excellent Vennedynde, and thanks to our excellent mastering and editing, and excellent mixing and sound effects at the amazing Rachel, and then we'll get it on the mixing and mixing at the mastering of the excellent mixing at this amazing editing and sound editing at our excellent sound engineer and editing.
Transcript
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So there's so much to talk about, and I'm really happy to have you on the podcast.
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How is it that you come to know many of the things you will obviously know as we get rolling
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Well, you know that British people don't like talking about themselves, but here goes.
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I'm proud to be the president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee.
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It's an extraordinary American organization founded by Albert Einstein, a refugee in New
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He founded the International Rescue Committee to rescue Jews from Europe.
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Our first employee, Ovarian Frye, employed to Marseille in 1940 and helped issue 2,000
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passports, fake passports, that helped Jews predominantly, but also intellectuals escape from
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People like Marc Chagall made it to the US because of the extraordinary heroism and ingenuity
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And today, the organization is an international humanitarian agency working in war zones and
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for internally displaced and for refugees around the world.
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And also the largest refugee resettlement agency in the United States, albeit there are
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very few refugees coming into the United States at the moment, and no doubt we'll talk about
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I suppose one question that your listeners might be thinking is, well, how did a guy with
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an accent that's more British than Brooklyn get to be the president and CEO of the International
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And I think that the backdrop is that I'd been in British politics and government for 25 years.
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In the 1990s, I was part of the project led by people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who
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I was part of the project to turn the British Labour Party from an election-losing machine.
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We'd lost four elections on the trot, 79, 83, 87, 92.
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People ask, must Labour lose, question mark, after the 1992 election.
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We were determined to rebuild a progressive party, a party of the centre-left that could win
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elections. And I'd then been fortunate enough to be involved both on the policy side in the run-up
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to 2001. And then in 2001, I was elected as a member of parliament for South Shields, which is
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an ex-shipbuilding, ex-mining constituency in the northeast of England. I was proud to be the
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member of parliament for 12 years until 2013. And in the 2000s, I was in government. I was minister
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for schools for three years. I was secretary of state for the environment, time when we legislated
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for the world's first emissions reduction requirements for 40, 50 years. Hence, we bound
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the hands of future British parliament. And between 2007 and 2010, I had the extraordinary
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honour of being the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the 74th Secretary of State for Foreign
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and Commonwealth Affairs of the UK, representing the country around the world. And I'd spent my
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time in diplomacy looking at global geopolitics, obviously. But we were in opposition in 2010.
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I'd lost the leadership race for the Labour Party in 2010. And so I felt a frustration that while I was
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proud to serve my constituents, I felt that I had more to give and more to do. And the International
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Rescue Committee offered me the chance to try and address some really tough issues in global policy.
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How do you get aid into Syria? How do you get education into Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan?
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How do you tackle sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo? And I felt that the IRC was a bit
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of a sleeping giant. And it had a chance to become a great organisation. And I suppose one other point
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that's relevant, and that I've learnt, I think, as I get older, is more important. Both of my parents
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were refugees. My dad was a refugee from Belgium to the UK in 1940. My mum spent the war in Poland,
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Poland, came as a 12-year-old in 1946, on her own. She was put on a boat by her mother. Her father had
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been killed in a concentration camp. And they were both Jewish, my mum and dad. And my mum came to the
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UK in 1946. And if Britain had not admitted refugees in the 1940s and 50s, then I, sure as nightfall as day,
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I wouldn't be here today. And so in some way, working for an organisation that was committed to helping
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people whose lives are shattered by conflict and disaster was a way of closing a circle, if you
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like, and putting back something that related to my own history, albeit in very different circumstances
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Hmm. Well, so you're obviously well-placed to speak about many of the things that interest me here. I
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want to talk about the pandemic and our inept response to it, the especially inept response
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of the United States. And what I certainly perceive to be America's loss of stature in the world. And
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we can talk about the reasons for that. And you seem to be in a great position to triangulate on
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our circumstance and view us both from inside and outside the US. I want to talk about that. But let's
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speak about the IRC for a bit here, because I want people to understand what it does. And I want to
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talk a little bit about the politics and ethics around just philanthropy and the way we think about
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refugees and humanitarian aid generally. First, how would you differentiate if, in fact, there is daylight
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between what the IRC does and some other groups? I know that the UN has its own refugee efforts, which I've
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supported in the past. There's obviously Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, that does
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medical work in similar conditions, the Red Cross, Save the Children. People know about many of these
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organizations. Where does IRC fit in that pantheon of people doing good in the world, you know, at
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considerable risk and expense? And frankly, without the kind of plaudits, you know, in certainly in
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mainstream conversation that you would expect all these groups to have?
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Yes, it's interesting, but it's a confusing picture. And we're a non-governmental organization.
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So the first point is we're different from the UN, because we are independent, we are adhering to
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the humanitarian principles of independence and neutrality and impartiality, but we're not a
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government agency. I think there are three or four ways that they make the IRC, the International
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Rescue Committee unique, distinctive. One is that we're not a generalized anti-poverty agency. We're
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focused on people whose lives are shattered by conflict and disaster. We're focused on people
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who are in war zones, people who are internally displaced in their own countries, people who are
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refugees. And I'll come back and explain a bit about the differences. And we're focused on people who
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start new lives in countries like the United States or Germany. We work across the arc of crisis. We
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work in about 35 to 40 countries, not the 120 countries that the anti-poverty agencies would
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work in. We're defined by our origins in that way. And when I arrived, we were, we defined ourselves as
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helping refugees and others. I thought that wasn't, I wouldn't have wanted to be an other. I thought we
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had to do a better job of defining who we were and who we served. And we settled on this phrase that we
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help people whose lives are shattered by conflict or disaster survive, recover, and gain control of
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their lives. And so the first point is that we have a focus. We're not trying to do everything.
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The second thing that I think makes the organization unusual is that it's both an international humanitarian
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aid agency in 200 field sites around the world, 35 to 40 countries, 13,000 employees now,
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and 17,000 auxiliary workers, many of whom are refugees and displaced people themselves. But
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we're also a refugee resettlement agency in 25 US cities. We're the largest refugee resettlement agency
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in the US. The US has historically been a leader in helping the most vulnerable refugees restart their
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lives in a new country. Interestingly, Ronald Reagan was the president who admitted the most refugees in
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the early 1980s, many from South Vietnam, 200, 210,000 a year. And under the Trump administration,
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the bipartisan support for refugee entry into the US has been slashed by about three quarters.
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But we are unusual, we're distinctive as an organization, but we're both an international
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humanitarian aid agency. We're a global agency in that sense. But we're also US focused through our 25
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cities. The third thing that I think makes us different is the focus on research and evidence. We
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talk a lot about impact. We spend a lot of time trying to document best practice, we say all of our
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programs must be evidence based or evidence generating. And we're now the largest research agency in the
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humanitarian sector. If you want to study crisis, the plurality of impact evaluations are done in done by the
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International Rescue Committee, and its partners. I suppose that the fourth element of this is, and that people
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often ask about is, how does the organization recruit and work? And about 95% of our staff are hired locally in
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the places that we work. So inside Syria, we've got 800 staff across the country in two main areas,
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northeast and northwest. And that pattern of local recruitment adds to our credibility, it adds to our
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local expertise, frankly, adds to our security. And so maybe just to put some flesh on the bones of this,
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just to give you a sense. At the moment, we know that there are wars and conflicts taking place in
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Syria, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, the most likely consequence of
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a civil war is another civil war. That's why I talk about the crisis of diplomacy. Internal displacement,
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that's people who've been, have had to flee their own homes, but stay within their own country. And in
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Syria, to take that as an example, there are about seven to eight million internally displaced.
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Globally, there are 45 million internally displaced. Then a refugee is someone who is forced from their
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home, not for economic reasons, but for political or conflict reasons, and lands in the next door or
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other country. And at the moment, there are about 29 and a half, 30 million refugees. If you're a
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refugee who's crossed a border into a neighboring state or another state, and you are claiming refugee
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status, but haven't yet received it, you're an asylum seeker. So there are about three and a half,
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four million of those. If you tally those numbers up, it's 80 million people. So for the first time
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since records began in the 1940s with the foundation of the UN, more than 1% of the world's population
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are now forced from their homes by conflict and violence. Separate from economic migration,
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these are people who are forcibly displaced. And so that's the kind of picture of who we are and where
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we work. The final part of the jigsaw is we are one of the implementing agencies. We're funded
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in the main, three quarters of our funding comes from governments. Our budget is about $850 million
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this year. Three quarters of our funding comes from government, 25% from the private individuals,
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foundations and corporations. And that's changed over the last five or six years that I've been at the
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IOC. In that period, our budget is more or less doubled. And the amount of private funding has also
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doubled in percentage of the total. But we're still partnering with US government,
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EU governments, et cetera, predominantly Western governments, although some governments in the
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Middle East. But we're also increasingly reliant on our private supporters. And we fit into the
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framework of humanitarian aid by working with UN agencies, working with host governments where they
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allow that, but always saying that it's the needs of the clients who drive us.
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Hmm. Let's talk about the ethics and the politics around this, because frankly, we don't speak or
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think about refugees very much unless there's some real obvious crisis or a crisis that for whatever
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reason gets our attention. Maybe there's always a crisis and we just avert our eyes at a certain
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point. But the time when this was really being talked about a lot as a phenomenon was during the
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height of the Syrian civil war and the refugee crisis, so-called refugee crisis in Europe in
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particular. And Trump's messaging around this issue, you know, captured a lot of attention in our local
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US politics. There's so much here that's confusing and becomes fodder for cynicism in the end that I think
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it would be good to just try to however patiently try to unpick some of these variables here. So for
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instance, so from my point of view, it just seems to me that we have a responsibility in the developed
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world to recognize that it's through no genius of our own that we weren't born in Syria in the middle
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of a civil war. That no one can take responsibility for the good luck for not having been born in Syria
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10 years ago, say. And therefore, it is surely a matter of luck that, you know, you and I and or
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anyone listening to this hasn't found himself or herself and their children to be in dire need of
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rescue from some hellscape of a failed state. So once you admit that, we can leave aside, you know,
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whether or not, you know, a person's agency should factor into this moral calculus. But there really
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is just no agency in play here. It's just a sheer disparity in luck. And, you know, those of us who
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find ourselves to be among the luckiest people who have ever lived, living in, you know, reasonably
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stable societies with a level of abundance that would be, you know, unimaginable in at least a quarter
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of the world, we have a responsibility to help people who are objectively among the least lucky people
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on earth at the moment. These are people living in poor, disease-ridden, and now conflict-ridden
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spots on the earth where life has become completely unlivable. And yet, what happened, certainly in the
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case of the Syrian diaspora, is political controversies around just what Angela Merkel did, you know, just
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kind of opening the doors in a fairly sudden and unmitigated way to a flood of people, some of whom were
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clearly refugees, but some, you know, upon even minimal analysis, revealed themselves to be economic
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migrants. And so that was the first failure of distinction that made many people, you know, very
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alarmed and closed the door to their what would otherwise have been a humanitarian response in many
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of them. And it amplified right-wing populism, which, you know, obviously, if you go far enough to the
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right, you have people who just don't care about refugees at all. But there were certainly people
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in the middle who want to help, but recognize that you can't just have an open borders policy,
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right? There has to be some criteria by which you admit people into your society, because, you know,
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if you have a great social safety net, it simply cannot absorb all the needy people on earth,
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you know, in any given state. So there has to be some filter. And a failure to distinguish
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between refugees and economic migrants seemed pretty important, and seems like it will always
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be important, at least to know who you're admitting. But in response to that right-wing
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response, you know, both the extreme version and the reasonable version, one then encountered a
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left-wing response, which seemed to grade fairly directly into a kind of open borders ethical
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argument, which is, you know, you have no right to maintain anything about your society in the face
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of this need. It's rarely put that starkly, but you find yourself, in arguing for anything like a sane
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policy, you find yourself on a slippery slope where there is no handhold, and we just have to
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allow, you know, all of humanity to equilibriate by osmosis, such that in the limit, there'd be no reason
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to come to New York, or LA, or San Francisco, or London, because the quality of life there would
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be reduced to whatever the common denominator would be for the entire planet. And no one's,
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no taxpayer in any of those cities is going to sign on to that. So let's just start with,
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Yeah, there's a good deal to unpack there, and I think it's worth unpacking. And if I may,
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I think we should unpack three things, because I think they do play into the debate. One is exactly
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the point you make, which is, are these people real refugees, or are they not? There's a second
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and third, which I'd just like to touch on, which I think does speak to the popular and political
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reaction around this. The second is around security, and are they properly vetted, which was a big issue
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in the US. And the third is, is there control of our borders, which speaks to your point. And if I may,
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I'll just address all three, because I think it's really important, if you want to defend
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the rights of refugees, that you take head on the points that are made when they are a reasonable
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point. So the first point is, how can you tell? What's the definition and how can you tell? The
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1951 Refugee Convention, transposed into US law in 1980 in the Refugee Act, talks about a well-founded
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fear of persecution. And what that means is, is it safe for the person to go home? And sometimes that
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can be told by where they're from. So it's not safe to send a Yazidi back to northwestern Iraq,
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for obvious reasons. They've been chased out. It's not safe to send a Muslim back to Burma,
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Myanmar, because they've been ethnically cleansed out of there. It's not safe to send a Sunni young
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man back to Syria, but he's going to be persecuted by the Assad regime. And my point to people is to
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say, we have now, over 70 years since the passage of the Refugee Convention, a well-founded, organized
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ways of treating each case and assessing them. And there's a good example in Germany, you mentioned
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Germany. Angela Merkel said she would assess the claims that turned out to be one and a half,
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one and three quarter million asylum seekers tried to claim asylum in Germany. And every case was
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addressed. And at the beginning, it was more or less 50-50. Then it became 70-30 who were being
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admitted. Now it's more like 40% who are admitted, 60% who are not. And so the system can work. It
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then becomes difficult, just in all transparency. There are then difficulties, and the Germans have
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faced this. Difficulties in then saying, well, if you failed your asylum application, it's then,
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and you're from Niger or you're from Mali, it may be hard to get them back. But nonetheless,
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I think the philosophical point, and I run an agency that is the largest refugee resettlement
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agency in America, we say very clearly, there should be a test. And if you pass, you should
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be effectively integrated into the society that you've come to. And if you don't, then you can't
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stay. And what we can point to is parts of the world that do this well. In America, it's not being
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done well at the moment. If you come and claim asylum in America in February before the COVID pandemic
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started, it would be three or four years before your case was actually seen in the immigration
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court. So the first thing is, it's a reasonable thing for you to say, it can there be a system
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that works. And my answer to that is yes, and it can evolve. So for example, 70 years ago,
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if you were a woman suffering domestic violence in El Salvador, and you fled and claimed asylum,
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it wouldn't have recognized your claim. Today, it can recognize your claim and your case law has
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built that up. If it's okay with you, can I just deal with the other two points?
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Because I think they're relevant. Look, there's a security point as well, which is to say, well,
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how do you know these people are safe? Who chooses them? And we went through this in inordinate
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detail, because the granting of resettlement or refugee status is important. We support,
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I support, effective security vetting. The truth is, it's tougher to get into America as a refugee
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than any other route, a tourist, a student, or anything else. The vetting process takes 18 to 24
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months. The UN defines the most vulnerable, but then it's US agencies, US officials who do the
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vetting. And I mean, some of the most tragic stories I've had are people who worked with the
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US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, who were promised that by working for the US military or diplomats,
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putting themselves at risk of reprisals, we employ some of these people, they would then be given
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haven. Now there are 100,000 Iraqis who are still waiting to be able to exercise that right to come
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and resettle in the US. And they've been literally standing, sitting next to senior American military
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diplomats, etc. And yet they're still caught up in the system. So I would say on the security front,
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there is proper, there can be proper vetting. The third element, which was perhaps bigger in the
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European debate than in the US debate, but it's part of the US debate is, well, hang on,
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what kind of controls are there at the border? And in Europe, in 2015-16, there wasn't an entry exit
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system where everyone arriving was properly docketed, properly noted, and properly registered.
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Now there is everyone entering and exiting the European Union, the 27, does get properly registered
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and vetted. And I think that it's, if the politics of the refugee issue goes wrong, it goes wrong on one
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of those three grounds. And it's very important that those people who are willing to have a fact-based
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argument on those three grounds have that fact-based argument, because I think it's a winnable
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argument. And interestingly enough, actually, if you look at the latest polling in America,
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it does wax and wane, but it's popped up again, the number of Americans, 60, 70% now, who are saying
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they recognize that if you're a victim of war in, for example, Syria, you should be allowed to take
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refuge here. It's a historic American tradition.
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Yeah. Yeah. So now how do you decide whether it's wise to resettle people in a country like
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America versus in a country bordering a conflict? If it's, you know, you take Turkey or Lebanon.
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That's a good question. Yeah. It's not our choice. We're a refugee resettlement agency. In the end,
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it's the US government who decides. But here's something that I think is really important,
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where people like me and our organization, we need to do a bigger and better job. There are a lot of
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myths associated with the refugee issue. One myth is that most refugees are in rich countries. And in
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fact, it's completely untrue. 86% of the world's refugees are in poor and lower middle-income
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countries. They are in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey. If they're from South Sudan, they're in Uganda, Kenya,
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Ethiopia. If they're from Somalia, they're in Kenya. If they're from Burma, Myanmar, they are in
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Bangladesh. And the number of refugees in America or Europe is actually pretty low by comparison.
00:24:10.160
It's a myth. And it's also a myth, by the way, that they're mainly in camps. Most 60% of refugees
00:24:16.560
are in urban areas now, not in camps. And the biggest myth, in a way, the most damaging one is
00:24:21.240
that, well, look, all they need to do is survive for a few months or a few years and they go home.
00:24:25.540
The truth is less than 3% of the world's refugees went home last year because the wars keep burning.
00:24:31.140
And you just say the list, Afghanistan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria now in its
00:24:38.500
10th year. And the figures are disputed and the figures are not great. But we're talking about
00:24:44.120
multi-generational displacement of a kind that we've never known. Because while the world has
00:24:50.820
a history of wars between states, what we're suffering from at the moment is wars within
00:24:55.060
states, civil wars. I mean, depending on how you classify the India-China standoff at the moment,
00:25:00.420
there are no hot wars between states at the moment. But there are 15, 20 countries who are
00:25:06.540
spilling out significant numbers of refugees because of implosion at home. And that is a new
00:25:13.040
phenomenon for which the tools of diplomacy that I used to be involved with for the British government
00:25:17.420
are not well suited because the record of helping peace building and peacemaking in countries of
00:25:23.980
civil war is not a good one. Yeah, it really is a circumstance where we've drawn lessons that
00:25:32.400
just can't be integrated into any political or behavioral plan. I mean, so you take Syria and
00:25:39.220
Afghanistan by turns. You know, we intervened in Afghanistan, and that's the, we being the United
00:25:47.060
States, and that is now our longest war in history. And I'm reasonably sure that once the last American
00:25:54.360
soldier leaves, we will feel that that was a pointless and ultimately, you know, masochistic exercise
00:26:02.880
in nation building. But we're also chastised for having done nothing about Syria. Although had we
00:26:12.560
gone into Syria, many would have been outraged that we hadn't learned the lesson of Afghanistan.
00:26:17.580
You really are, you know, damned if you do, damned if you don't. And mere diplomacy, you know, not sending
00:26:23.820
troops of any kind seems, in many cases, totally ineffectual. What has diplomacy done for the
00:26:31.760
Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has simmered now for at least 50 years? And many of these things,
00:26:37.920
as you know, just rage out of sight and out of minds. You take something like Yemen. I know in
00:26:43.660
the abstract that Yemen is a terrible place to be right now. I was there last year, and we've got
00:26:49.300
800 people working there. It's the world's largest, 24 million people in humanitarian need. And so you're
00:26:54.720
right to raise it as a terrible failure of diplomacy, as well as a military strategy, misbegotten military
00:27:00.840
strategy. So what could we do? And so given our experience in Afghanistan and elsewhere, given our
00:27:06.920
experience of avoiding conflict in Syria, and we had Obama's, you know, red line, which Assad quickly crossed,
00:27:16.260
revealing us to be some kind of paper tiger, or at least an exhausted superpower, what to do? I mean, if you were
00:27:23.400
in control right now, if you could just pull the levers of diplomacy, or military intervention, or,
00:27:30.100
you know, strong-arming our allies and adversaries, you take the Saudis' involvement in Yemen, what do you
00:27:40.020
think the U.S. should do, or the U.S. should attempt to get its allies to collaborate on?
00:27:45.720
Mm-hmm. Well, look, it's an important and a good question. And the first thing to recognize is that
00:27:52.100
there are different cases. From Afghanistan, America faced a threat to its own homeland. Syria
00:27:59.080
doesn't represent that. And Yemen represents a, the meltdown of Yemen represents a threat to an
00:28:05.200
American ally, although there is now a debate in America about the extent to which Saudi Arabia should
00:28:09.900
be seen as an ally. So I want to say that I recognize the differences. But I want to also try and say that
00:28:15.780
there are some common elements. And I don't want to sound glib, because these are very, very difficult
00:28:20.300
issues. But I think there are some common elements of learning that we can say. The first is that without
00:28:27.240
a clear view of the political settlement in a country, the political compromises between different
00:28:33.980
religious or ethnic or geographic groups, without a vision of the political settlement,
00:28:39.900
no military strategy, no development strategy, no diplomatic strategy will work. That's a common
00:28:45.440
lesson from all of the conflicts that you have mentioned. And you can add Iraq to that. That
00:28:51.700
essentially civil war is the failure of politics by other means. It's not the continuation of politics,
00:28:58.800
as Klaus Witz said. It's the failure of politics. And it's the failure to build political institutions
00:29:04.380
that can forge compromise and share spoils. So that's, I think, the first warning. The second
00:29:13.200
point is that unless you are willing to put assets in play, and they don't have to be military assets,
00:29:19.300
they could be economic assets, unless you're willing to exercise leverage, then diplomacy on its own is not
00:29:25.560
going to work. I think Frederick the Great said that diplomacy without arms is like music without
00:29:32.200
instruments. And this applies not just to military, but to economic and other political pressure. If you're not
00:29:39.300
willing, if you don't want to put pressure on Saudi Arabia in respect of Yemen, then they're not going to take any
00:29:45.200
notice of you. And so I think there's a question of priority and interest, frankly. President Trump has
00:29:54.180
inaugurated what Richard Haas of the Council on Foreign Relations calls the withdrawal doctrine, which is
00:30:00.440
essentially that you get out of everything. And you don't accept the argument that the world is
00:30:05.820
interdependent. And you assert that America can prosper through its own means, and it doesn't need to get
00:30:12.640
its hand in the mangle. So the second, I think, common element is that unless you're willing to put skin
00:30:17.740
in the game of different kinds, then it won't work. The third element of this, from the conflicts that
00:30:25.960
you mentioned, is that these civil wars, and civil conflicts, one can add others, is that unless you
00:30:33.320
think about the region, as well as about the country concerned, you're not going to be able to forge a
00:30:40.880
conclusion. I came to this studying the Afghan issue very closely. I went to Afghanistan for the first time in
00:30:47.440
2007. As it happened, I was there for the funeral of the last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, July 2007.
00:30:55.620
Afghans from all across the country, and frankly, all across the world gathered, but so did the region. And it came
00:31:01.020
home to me so strongly that there could be no Afghan settlement without a regional settlement. And frankly, that
00:31:07.460
applies in other parts of the world as well. So the diplomacy is not just bilateral, nation to nation,
00:31:14.820
it's also got to include the rest of the region. Now, if you just take those first three principles
00:31:19.340
and start applying them, actually, American power works. I mean, if you listen, if you think about
00:31:23.160
Yemen, the world's largest humanitarian crisis, Bruce Rydell, Brookings Institution, formerly an American
00:31:28.500
government, outstanding scholar of the Yemen catastrophe, he says, look, if America put down
00:31:35.060
its foot and said to Saudi Arabia, you must stop this war tomorrow, because it's a misbegotten military
00:31:40.820
strategy that is actually strengthening Iran, not weakening it, it's creating space for al-Qaeda rather
00:31:46.160
than reducing it. And America was willing to put its assets on the line to ensure that happened, Bruce
00:31:51.960
Rydell will tell you, it would happen tomorrow. And I don't want to oversimplify this, because stopping the
00:31:57.180
fighting is not just a matter of what the Saudis do in Yemen, it's also a matter of what the Houthis
00:32:00.460
do, and the Houthis are backed by the Iranians. But the strategy of the Saudi-led coalition, which I'm
00:32:04.880
sorry to say the US and the UK are signed up to, is a misbegotten military strategy. And there's a
00:32:11.060
danger that America underestimates its power and mislearns the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, which I
00:32:17.740
think are painful, incredibly painful, not, I wouldn't say pointless, you said that we'll look back on
00:32:23.440
Afghanistan as pointless. If you're an Afghan, you wouldn't say it was pointless. But I know what
00:32:26.940
you're saying, the price has been very, very high indeed. But I think...
00:32:30.220
Well, I guess I would add to the picture of pointlessness, the prospect that in the end,
00:32:37.180
wherever we recognize the end to be, we may just see a resurgence of the Taliban and a return to
00:32:48.860
You may, and many Afghans would fear that, especially female Afghans. But the American
00:32:54.960
national interest would say the big question is not ended by the question of the Taliban. The big
00:33:01.920
question for America's strategic interest is whether Afghanistan is a source of threat to the
00:33:07.420
wider world by providing a haven for al-Qaeda or others. But I mean, I take your point about the
00:33:15.320
progress, but it didn't start as a nation building, quote unquote, nation building process. But my point
00:33:20.820
in answer to your question is that we need to create a new kind of diplomacy. I mean, I was the
00:33:26.840
Secretary of State in the UK. Diplomacy was in a transitional period, because this question of the
00:33:33.640
civil wars that were threats to regional peace and security was emerging because of the failings in
00:33:38.160
Iraq and Afghanistan. And what we face now is a true crisis of diplomacy. It's not just that wars
00:33:44.720
are continuing. We are living through what I call an age of impunity. And I get, I'm sorry, I apologize.
00:33:51.140
I don't know if I need to apologize, but I get passionate about this because literally,
00:33:56.000
international rescue community staff running an ambulance in northwest Afghanistan get bombed
00:34:01.580
by their own government and by the Russians. That is the age of impunity. The fact that
00:34:07.780
70% of people who die in war today are civilians in urban areas is the age of impunity. The fact that
00:34:16.880
aid workers are killed in higher numbers is the age of impunity. The fact that military commanders in
00:34:22.520
Yemen, where a coachload of children were bombed by the Saudi-led coalition in Syria, never mind what
00:34:28.940
non-state organization, the fact that military commanders think they can get away with anything
00:34:35.680
means they do everything. They do everything beyond the limits that we thought we'd established after
00:34:41.620
the Second World War. Chemical weapons, they get used. Bombing of civilians, that gets used. Cluster
00:34:46.440
munitions, that gets used. That is the age of impunity. And my point is that the retreat of
00:34:53.260
countries like the US for all of the failings, for all of the mistakes, for all of the dangers of
00:34:59.200
thinking in an American-centric or Euro-centric way, when countries that formally are committed to human
00:35:08.060
rights and to the accountability of power, when they retreat from the global stage, and remember,
00:35:13.360
my own country is in retreat as well, exemplified by Brexit. When those countries retreat, for all their
00:35:20.140
failings, the bar for the legitimate exercise of power goes down, and the tendency for power to be
00:35:28.500
abused goes up. And that's what we're seeing in the war zones, the conflict zones around the world,
00:35:36.080
both in ungoverned space and in governed space. Ungoverned where non-state actors are in control,
00:35:41.920
governed where state actors who are formally meant to be committed to international treaties are concerned.
00:35:46.980
So I think that your question about what's the right lesson of the traumas of the last 20 years
00:35:53.680
of foreign policy is incredibly important in a world where there are growing numbers of these
00:35:58.340
unstable states, producing growing numbers of refugees who are in miserable conditions in too
00:36:04.140
many circumstances themselves, and for whom the international aid system is at the moment a
00:36:10.160
sticking plaster. Okay, so let's linger on this skepticism about the wisdom or pragmatism of worrying about the
00:36:20.280
rest of the world in the first place. So you have this retreat to nationalism, populism, and a kind of
00:36:29.560
radical selfishness that is on one level understandable, because again, we rarely see the evidence of great
00:36:39.420
success for all of our misadventures out in the world. And, you know, I mean, we have historical
00:36:45.400
successes. We look back at the resolution of World War II, and we see that what we did in Germany and
00:36:52.480
Japan in the aftermath, well, these are now allies, and, you know, we're not dealing with mortal enemies
00:36:58.260
anymore. These are some of our closest allies. So clearly, it's possible to rectify even the worst
00:37:06.200
schism diplomatically in the end, even in the aftermath of the worst possible war. But there's
00:37:13.160
not much evidence of that, at least in popular consciousness of late. And just take the American
00:37:19.680
case, and I'm sure it's somewhat similar under the shadow of Brexit in the UK. But in America,
00:37:26.040
you know, you look around at our own failing infrastructure, you look at the crisis of homelessness
00:37:32.380
in major cities. And it's easy to draw the lesson, we can't even put our own house in order. And we are
00:37:40.860
hemorrhaging jobs and economic prospects. Again, we'll turn the conversation toward the pandemic and
00:37:49.240
all of its knock-on effects soon. But I could see that somebody in a Trumpian frame of mind could
00:37:55.600
say, well, all of those crises, as tragic as they are, are far away. And, you know, I know I'm being
00:38:03.440
told a story that the world is interconnected. But what I find most galling is that the potholes in
00:38:09.960
my own roads, and the homeless people on my own doorstep, that those problems can't even be solved,
00:38:16.080
apparently, by the exercise of government and by, you know, my paying my taxes year after year.
00:38:23.380
There's just a general message of hopelessness and ineffectuality, the zero-sum marshalling of
00:38:31.920
resources, where it's just, there's just not enough money or attention to go around. So why pay
00:38:37.180
attention to any of this? Why isn't the Trumpian retreat to the Citadel both politically, we understand
00:38:45.000
it's politically pragmatic to anyone who's thinking along these lines, but why isn't it actually
00:38:49.820
a plausible path toward at least American and first world prosperity?
00:38:58.360
Well, let's not call it a Trumpian point. Let's call it a good point. It's a good point to say,
00:39:02.760
if America can't, America should be able to fix its potholes, and it should be able to fix its
00:39:07.800
education system, and it should be able to fix its immigration system. Now, those are good,
00:39:12.440
perfectly sensible points. And I think the way to address them is as follows, or at least discuss
00:39:19.180
them is as follows, beyond saying that those are rightful frustrations, to put it mildly.
00:39:24.940
The first is that tending to the international front does not preclude tending to the home front.
00:39:33.740
The diplomacy doesn't take away from the home front. And frankly, the sums of money involved
00:39:38.060
are also limited. The sums of money in respect of overseas aid are very small. 0.17% of US
00:39:49.260
Actually, I just want to just flag a fascinating poll result. I don't know if this is done year
00:39:54.060
after year, but I know it's been done. Well, you ask people whether we give too much money to foreign
00:39:59.780
aid or not. And most people, I forget the actual numbers here, you might know them, but most people
00:40:05.180
in the US think we give too much to foreign aid. But when asked how much we should give,
00:40:11.460
they put the number at something like 4%, which is, you know, 10x what we actually give.
00:40:17.380
Yes. And also, they think the current level is 25% or very high. So look, the demand to fix the home
00:40:25.300
front is a rightful one. But point one, that doesn't preclude you from working internationally.
00:40:31.900
Secondly, you use the phrase retreat to the citadel, which is a great phrase, the Israeli author Yuval
00:40:37.720
Harari talks about a dystopian future of a quote, unquote, network of fortresses. And it's dystopian
00:40:44.440
because it doesn't work. The blessings of the global economy, global innovation, mean that a future
00:40:52.620
of a network of fortresses is not going to deliver anything that people have come to expect or hope
00:41:01.440
for. That's the reality of the global economy and society. And that's why the pandemic does provide
00:41:08.500
an absolutely critical point of rupture. If the lesson of the pandemic is that a connected world is
00:41:17.820
dangerous, then we're going to have de-globalization retreat from connection, and I'm afraid not actually
00:41:23.580
tackle the problem. If the diagnosis of the pandemic is that globalization has been mismanaged,
00:41:28.920
that actually we need a stronger World Health Organization, not a weaker one, that if you're
00:41:33.000
worried about Chinese influence in the World Health Organization, the worst possible thing to do is
00:41:37.260
to pull out from the American point of view. So the second part of the answer, I think, is to
00:41:44.520
make the case that the world is more interdependent than when John Kennedy proclaimed a declaration of
00:41:51.440
interdependence on Independence Day 1962. He went to Philadelphia and he said, my fellow Americans,
00:41:58.340
we're living in an interdependent world and we need a declaration of interdependence. And it's even
00:42:02.880
more the case today, whether you think about the supply chains that allow the economy to proceed,
00:42:08.240
never mind the innovations, for example, on the vaccine that need to be globally spread.
00:42:14.520
There probably is a third part to this, though, which is important, which is to really recognize
00:42:19.280
that the renewal of fragile and failing states around the world is primarily the responsibility
00:42:24.080
of people who live there. And it's important not to have hubris about the role of international
00:42:29.480
engagement. But it's equally or even in some ways more dangerous not to recognize
00:42:34.160
that the retreat from from global engagement doesn't mean that other people aren't there.
00:42:39.160
I mean, if America retreats, that doesn't mean the Russians are going to retreat or the Chinese
00:42:42.960
are going to retreat. In fact, the evidence of the last six months is that China thinks that
00:42:47.760
American retreat creates circumstances for it to expand its footprint. And so I think there is a
00:42:53.280
global security aspect that doesn't have the short term resolution of fixing a pothole,
00:43:01.600
but does speak to the kind of strategic, patient, global engagement that is essential
00:43:08.080
to the prosperity and security of a country like this. And that's a political argument that has
00:43:12.760
run for 200 years in this country. I'm very conscious of that. And I wouldn't teach American
00:43:16.780
politicians how to win it, not least because we lost it in my own country. But I think that it is
00:43:21.560
striking to me that the European Union is defying the predictions that it was going to
00:43:26.800
crumble under the weight of COVID. And for medium sized countries, the case for global engagement
00:43:34.800
is overwhelmingly strong. I think that the case that has to be made here is obviously different
00:43:39.060
because this is a superpower. And it's one of only two real superpowers in the world. And it's a harder
00:43:44.100
argument. But I think that if you if you want to think about American prosperity and security,
00:43:48.600
it's intimately linked, not just to its neighbors to the south and to the north, because by virtue of
00:43:53.280
geography, you're a long way from some of the world's trouble spots. But if we've learned anything
00:43:57.240
in the last six months, it's that the world is actually smaller, not more disconnected than people
00:44:03.200
say. Yeah, well, you mentioned Harari and a point he makes a lot, which, you know, it's very simple,
00:44:10.500
it's almost an aphorism, but it does seem like a very good heuristic for thinking about this.
00:44:15.960
He says that there are global problems, which only admit of global solutions. There's no single
00:44:24.540
nation that can solve the problem of climate change, or a truly adequate pandemic response.
00:44:32.300
And either there are many things in the end that will be added to that list of threats, which is some
00:44:37.840
of which are, you know, existential threats. I mean, there are developments in technology,
00:44:41.980
which could spell the end of us, for which we're currently in an arms race condition. I mean,
00:44:48.080
you know, whether it's AI or genetic engineering, nanotechnology, any one of these things could
00:44:54.200
get away from us, even under the best conditions of success. And if we merely have an arms race,
00:45:00.340
and are not collaborating globally around some understanding of the shared risks, the very
00:45:08.780
Look, I think that's a great point. And it obviously has a climate dimension. But here's
00:45:12.500
an interesting thing. I was in Beijing last November, and quite a senior person said to me,
00:45:17.240
look, I'm really worried about cyber warfare directed at nuclear power plants. And do you think
00:45:25.440
that this is something that China and the West could collaborate on? And the fact that they're
00:45:31.380
thinking about it is a good thing. The fact that they're worried about whether or not the West would
00:45:35.180
talk to them and collaborate on it is a bad thing, because it speaks to a kind of myopia that has
00:45:43.920
So now, where do you come down on collaborating with governments whose human rights records are
00:45:52.400
objectively worse than ours, perhaps not worse than ours have ever been in our history, but worse than
00:45:58.880
ours are now. And I mean, we've mentioned the Saudis, we mentioned China, it's often seen as a moral
00:46:07.060
failing not to issue ultimatums, you know, where one can. But whatever the other topics of conversation,
00:46:15.040
if you're talking to the Saudis, and you're not admonishing them about their, you know, treatment of
00:46:21.160
women or apostates, or, you know, any other minority who fares terribly under that theocracy,
00:46:29.480
if you're talking to China, and you're not belaboring the point about, you know, their concentration camps
00:46:35.480
now for the Uyghurs, and yet, those are the very points which might cause conversation on any other
00:46:43.240
topic to totally break down. How would you recommend governments and individual politicians
00:46:52.520
Well, to answer your question directly, should we be collaborating, which was the word you used,
00:46:57.980
with governments that are repressing human rights? The answer is, we should certainly not be
00:47:03.520
collaborating in the repression of human rights. Collaboration means egging on, supporting.
00:47:09.520
You know, I mean, I mean, on other fronts, yeah.
00:47:11.500
So, but I think it's important to start with that, that to collaborate in something is to
00:47:17.020
help it happen. Secondly, I think that it's really important that if we don't, if we're not
00:47:25.600
willing to defend our own values, and speak to our own values, which is the most basic defense of them,
00:47:30.560
then what use are they? And so if the first point is that there shouldn't, you shouldn't be
00:47:36.340
collaborating in the repression of human rights, the second point is, should you be speaking up
00:47:41.000
about it? My answer to that would be yes. I mean, I spent three years as foreign minister.
00:47:45.640
And I think that you, when you go to China, they don't respect you, if you don't raise
00:47:51.820
difficult issues, that they will not respect you, they know what's on your mind. And maybe more ways
00:47:59.520
than one, but the, they, they, they, they've scanned your phone. Yeah.
00:48:03.740
But the, so, so if you don't have the self-respect to speak up for what you think, that I think
00:48:11.020
betokens weakness, and you can guarantee you'll get nowhere. Thirdly, you use the word ultimatums,
00:48:16.580
and the truth about ultimatums is twofold. One, you should never use an ultimatum unless you're
00:48:21.620
willing to follow through. And secondly, you shouldn't overuse ultimatums, because if you throw
00:48:25.580
around too many ultimatums, you'll be shown to be not just a broken record, but actually a hollow
00:48:30.440
shell. So you have to choose your ground. The fourth thing that I think is incredibly important
00:48:35.620
is that in dealing with powerful autocrats, nevermind, leave aside the less powerful one,
00:48:44.140
because that makes it too easy. If you're dealing with powerful autocrats, powerful autocratic
00:48:51.000
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