How Melting Ice Is Redrawing the Global Order | Rana Foroohar

In Episode 501 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Rana Foroohar about her book, Sea Change, and her argument that, as polar ice melts and new sea routes open, the Arctic has become the most consequential and least understood geopolitical theater in the world, with the great powers competing over trade routes, resources, and military dominance. They discuss: The strategic logic behind agreements like the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort between the US, Finland, and Canada Why China has spent two decades quietly ring-fencing the world's maritime chokepoints The Trump administration's approach to Greenland, NATO, and the Western Hemisphere The reversal of forty years of market-knows-best trade economics in favor of more state-directed, national security-focused trade and industrial policy They close with a conversation about domestic politics, including the fight over the future of economic nationalism, the populist backlash against AI and corporate concentration, and what, if anything, could rebuild a shared sense of civic responsibility and shared sacrifice in America. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Grafinus, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. As polar ice melts and U.S. routes open, the Arctic has become the most consequential and least understood geopolitical theater in the world, according to Rana Faruha. She joins me in today's episode of Hidden Forces to discuss her book, Sea Change, which provides a sweeping account of how the Arctic is quickly becoming the new arena of global conflict as the world's great powers battle over trade routes, resources, and military dominance.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Rana and I discuss the strategic logic behind agreements like the Icebreaker collaboration effort between the U.S., Finland, and Canada, why China has spent two decades quietly ring-fencing the world's maritime choke points, the Trump administrations' approach to Greenland, NATO, and the Western Hemisphere, and the reversal of 40 years of market-knows-best policies on trade economics in favor of more state-directed, national-security-focused trade and industrial policies. We close with a discussion about domestic politics, the fight over the future of economic nationalism, the populist backlash against AI and corporate concentration, and what, if anything, could rebuild

• 1:24Speaker 00

  a shared sense of civic responsibility and shared sacrifice in American life. If you want access to transcripts and intelligence reports for this and other episodes, which includes summary sections with key takeaways, you can access those by subscribing to our Super Nerd tier at hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected],

• 2:08Speaker 00

  and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly important and expansive conversation with my guest, Rana Faruha.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Rana Faruha, welcome back to Hidden Forces.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. I feel like really special to get round two with you. Do very many people get round two?

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Well, not many. There are some people do. Special people, special people get more than one appearance on the podcast. Your last appearance, I think, was in 2018 or maybe 2019.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was around my first book.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  That's right. Well, was it your first book, Don't Be Evil?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Oh, it was Don't Be... No, that was my second book. That was my second book.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Your second book?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  So, this book is titled Sea Change: America's New Great Game in the Arctic Circle. I feel like this sort of breaks with your previous books, which were more about corporate concentration, distributional economics, kind of progressive economic issues. What led you down this road to do a book about, essentially, what is essentially national security geopolitics and a bit of industrial policy?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Well, you know, just by saying those three things, you've actually kind of brought us to where we are in the political economy in America right now. So, national security, industrial policy, I mean, these are things that actually are part of a conversation, not just in progressive economic circles, but actually in conservative circles as well. And I have always been interested, actually, in industrial policy. My first book, Makers and Takers, was looking at, you know, why does the financial system not serve Main Street? Why can Wall Street be way up here? And, you know, we can still be having an economy that a lot of people feel crap in. That held, and it's actually part of this story in the sense that one of the reasons we have such a bifurcated economy

• 3:58Speaker 01

  is that in the neoliberal era and the post-Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the 1990s, we decided to outsource our industrial supply chains. I mean, we basically decided that making things in America didn't matter anymore. As long as everybody could be a software developer or a banker, you know, that was okay. That was the top of the pyramid of the economy. But we're now living in a world post-COVID, post-war in Ukraine, post-Iran war, post-choke points, U.S.-China conflict, climate change, migration, you know, that you need resiliency. You need to be able to build things. And layering into that, when the Biden administration came in, I was friendly, I was tight with a lot of those people. It's really funny when you suddenly, you know, I've been doing my job long enough that the Biden folks come in,

• 4:43Speaker 01

  and I'm like, oh, my God, like, I used to go shoe shopping with Heather Boucher. Now she's in the White House. Like, what? I used to, I used to know these people as kids. And everybody was on board with, look, we've got to rebalance the economy. And I knew that they were going to do industrial strategy and chips and semiconductors, you know, which we can talk about. But I also knew that they were interested in ships. And here's what's really fascinating. Trump had been interested in ships, too, and he still is. So, there was this idea of, let's build ships again, that stretched through three administrations, was very bipartisan, and reflected a deeper, and this is really the deepest part of the book, core geostrategic shift that I was interested in,

• 5:26Speaker 01

  which is that we had been moving from globalization to something more regional, local. I'd explored that in my previous book, Homecoming. And that now, I believe, we are in something that looks very much like the 19th century Great Game, where you've got two powers. You've got the U.S. and China. But it's not a one-and-done conflict. It is a multi-decade, multi-generational conflict that is going to reshape all kinds of places in the world. And the Arctic is actually one of the theaters in which that conflict is going to be happening. So, final point, I got a chance, I called up Jake Sullivan, who was the national security advisor at the time, and I said, I want to get on Icebreaker and go to the Arctic. And he's like, okay. So, so I did. And that's how I got to the book.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  So, when was that? When did you actually put that plan together?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, the plan, I got on the boat in October, November of 2024. But I had been talking really, almost since the Biden administration began, to folks, particularly on the labor left, because, as you might remember, the Biden administration brought what's called a 301 trade case against China. And what that means is, when you bring a 301 case, you're saying to another country, your practices are fundamentally unfair. You are doing things that are not okay by the rules of the WTO. Not that too many people pay attention to the WTO these days, but it's a big deal, because then that allows the government to start slapping on tariffs. They can put all kinds of fees onto other countries. And unions, labor leaders, had actually decided

• 6:57Speaker 01

  that ships were the area to bring this case. They knew they had one shot for a 301 against China. And a friend of mine, Mike Wessel, who's a longtime labor-left politico, he represents the steelworkers, he has his own consultancy in Washington, you know, never lost his, he was one of these labor-left guys that I love, because he never lost his way. He worked for Dick Gephardt back in the day. He knew that Democrats had to keep working people if they wanted to keep power. And so, he had calculated with a bunch of other unions that the best industry to target China in would be shipbuilding for two reasons. You could send the strongest signal for steel, which would then send another signal for things like machine tools, electricians, you know, all kinds of unions could come in.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  But also maritime power, sea power, was going to become a major, major issue for national security. And China has quietly, very, very directly, very consistently been ring-fencing the world's maritime and shipbuilding industries for about the last 20 years. And they're now in a place, and you can see this with the choke points in Hormuz, Suez Canal, Panama Canal, where they have access, more shipping access in different parts of the world, and can do things like run a transpolar route every week in order to avoid hot points, go into portlands in Latin America that they own 50% of and have access to places that might otherwise be, you know, become choke points.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  So, that story really began to fascinate me, because to me, it was a story of long-term thinking on the part of the Chinese and Americans with their typical, oh, what's going to happen the next five minutes, week, quarter? And then, oh, my gosh, suddenly, we only have 187 ocean-going vessels, and the Chinese have 5,500. Oops, guess we better fix that.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  So, I'm wondering whether, I want to ask you one more question about maybe your process, and specifically related to the Healy.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Why did you feel it was important to spend time aboard the Coast Guard Icebreaker Healy? And how long were you at sea for?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  So two reasons, well, three reasons. I do big ideas books, which is, you know, I think why I come on your show. Big ideas books are great. I love to start with a worldview. And I started with the worldview in this book that we were moving into a new political economy where government intervention in markets was going to become much more common. Spheres of influence and great power competition were going to become much more common. But over the last few years, what I've realized, and I think most authors have realized is it's you can't sell a big idea book if it doesn't have a narrative. You know, people want people. They want to understand stories through other people and they want, you know, and deserve a rip and yarn where it's a page turner, not just, you know, telling you something deep and, you know, that you might learn in school. And so I thought, well, gosh, what

• 9:42Speaker 01

  could my colorful narrative be? And around the time I was talking to the Biden folks, Jake Sullivan and his team actually cut a deal on the sidelines of a NATO conference that got very, very little attention, like almost nobody wrote about it. But I was following what they were doing. So I noticed it. And they cut this deal to build icebreakers with the Finns and the Canadians. Now, I had been the first person to sit and do an interview with Janet Yellen when she used the word friend shoring at the Atlantic Council. And I have always been fascinated by, yeah, America is going to need to work more with allies. We need to have more resilient supply chains, but we're not going to do it all alone. Let's

• 10:22Speaker 01

  friend shore. And to me, this deal was like, oh, my God, this is a little gem of friend shoring, because you've got two countries, Finland and Canada, at the time, looking to strengthen their position in NATO. You've got the Finns, who design 80% of the world's icebreakers, build 60% of them, that can actually teach Americans how to build ships again. Because going back to the first point, as the US outsourced its industrial supply chain, America, which used to build the majority of ships in the 70s, now builds 0.2% of the world's ships by tonnage. We don't know how to build these things, you know, over budget, long time. So the Finns would come in, and it would be a kind of an interesting

• 11:02Speaker 01

  tech transfer, not from the US to China, but from Finland to the US. And the Canadians, who have a lot of skin in the game in the Arctic, and also have some rich shipbuilding companies, could provide more expertise and capital. And ultimately, this could become a model for, all right, let's say we decide we need to build more PPE as a country, or build rare earth mineral stocks, or build semiconductors again, or build other complex machinery. Which are the strategic partners we should choose? So that's why I wanted to follow that particular story. And then I thought, okay, I've got to get on an icebreaker, because who wouldn't want to go on an icebreaker for 10 days? I mean, singular experience.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  It's the only one in the Arctic, by the way. The only US Coast Guard heli was at the time I was on it, anyway. It was the only icebreaker in the Arctic.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  The experience sounded awful.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  I mean, for me, I would-

• 11:58Speaker 01

  But that doesn't make it undesirable as a journalist.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  No, for sure. That's a different story entirely. But in terms of whether or not I would like to find myself in those circumstances, I don't think I would. What do you feel like you you learned from that experience that you would not have learned otherwise? And that you were able to convey some important lessons that you were able to convey to the reader? Beyond simply the narrative arc and the characters on the ship?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I don't know that I didn't know this before, but it sure as heck deepened my understanding. You know, I come from a military family, and I come from a family that's very into service. My mother's a teacher. I felt when I was with these people, there were 94 people on board. I was the only journalist. There were about 13 scientists, but everybody else was Coast Guard. There were some Navy Secans, some security people. These were, these were people that were, they were in the service profession. And they were people, many of them had advanced degrees, many of them had worked in the private sector. They could have been off doing much fancier jobs, making, you know, exponentially more than they were making onboard this ship, and living in, as you say, you know, reduced

• 13:01Speaker 01

  circumstances. I was in luxury. I was in like a 300 square foot, as my architect friend would say, tenement beige room with, with a shared bathroom with six people. But that was luxury in the Coast Guard. And they're doing it because they're adventurers, because they care about their country. The Coast Guard is an interesting branch of the military because it is only about service, and it is about service to the nation. They are patrolling waters, they are taking environmental measures, they're helping rescue people, sailors at sea. It's not about fighting wars. And so a lot of the people that were onboard were just deeply invested in how can I help my country? How can I do something interesting

• 13:41Speaker 01

  while I'm doing that? And how can I go out into an entirely different universe? I mean, every time they go out, you are seeing things like polar bears fighting, you know, you're seeing giant herds of walruses coming up and like looking at you and ready to be fed off the side of the boat. You know, you are, just the feel of it, when you're breaking through five feet of ice, and you're sitting in the mess hall, and you've got 12 inches of reinforced steel between you and death, basically, and you're hearing this shh, like fingers on a chalkboard sound. When you're going up at night and seeing the northern lights just surrounding you, it is a very otherworldly experience. And it was particularly

• 14:26Speaker 01

  a deep one for me, because it was just a few days before the last presidential election. And the captain, Michelle Shalopp, a woman, actually, and she was replaced by a woman, interestingly, had decided we were going to get back to shore so that everybody could cast their absentee ballot. She was very, very concerned that everybody have a chance to vote. But all of that seemed so far away when you are in the middle, literally in the middle of nowhere, in a place that is so quiet and so beautiful, and the light is very, very different. It really makes you feel much more in touch, you know, with the eternal, in some ways.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  Hmm. Well, how did this experience inform your understanding of climate change? Because the impacts of climate change are most obvious in the poles, in the North Pole, specifically. And I'd like to even hear a bit more about the experience of being in that environment. What did you learn about nature?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Great question. Well, so, climate change is actually the reason that I could even do the book, because nobody much cared about the Arctic, at least from a commerce and security and geopolitical point of view, until it started melting. Because what happened is these icebergs and ice floes that normally would make it impossible to transnavigate the region, they start to melt and pull back. And so now, during the summer season, you have a much longer period of time where ships can actually trans, do a transarctic route. There's three ways across the poles right now. So there's the Northern Sea Route, which is mainly across Russian waters. Russia claims a lot of those waters

• 15:58Speaker 01

  now as its own national territory. They are militarizing that area. China has a weekly shipping route now across the Northern Sea Route. It's making it, China's actually declared itself a near Arctic nation, so it's making this a big, big part of its own one belt, one road strategy. So that's one way. The other way is the Northwest Passage, which goes through near Alaska, through Canadian waters. And then there's this formerly theoretical, but now increasingly real transpolar route. So for about three weeks each year now, you can actually go smack dab above the poles, because there is enough ice breakage that ships can get through. And once ships can start getting through the Arctic, well, as

• 16:41Speaker 01

  the Chinese shipping company that started its route last month was saying, it cuts 40% of the time of the normal routes off. Think about the energy savings in that. Think about the resiliency that that gives you to avoid choke points in other hotspots. So everybody is now going up there and saying, we want to figure out how much more we can transport across the Arctic. The other thing that's happening, and this gets into what was it like to be in nature there, lot of minerals, lot of mineral resources on the Arctic seabed, huge fishery reserves. I mean, by the way, I had some Arctic salmon. Like, you've not had salmon until, it's like one of those things where you taste fish that's like come from a place where the fish had been swimming this way for a million

• 17:25Speaker 01

  years, and you're like, oh, that's a fish. You suddenly realize what you're getting at, you know, even at Whole Foods is not, not, not the real deal.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  How much of your diet was actually fish and other catches from the sea versus stuff that you guys brought with you for the journey?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  It mostly, it's stuff that the Coast Guard would requisition, which, by the way, the food rocked. Can I just tell you? I, I brought like a ton of little green juice bottles and vitamins and things like that. I thought I was going to be just like not seeing anything. It was amazing. I mean, they've got really good refrigeration systems. Food is actually very important onboard the boat. It's a major morale builder. And also, the mess hall is a place, the guy that runs the food systems, Aman David, that I spoke to extensively, is really the liaison between the officers and the enlisted people, because the mess hall is where everybody congregates. That's where everybody talks. That's where you can see like, all the things that are happening on the boat. But you could, you could go out and fish. You could, you know, bring in things if you wanted to. I'll just

• 18:25Speaker 01

  say one more thing about the resources. One of the things that we did on the boat, which was fascinating, was do sonar mapping of the seabed. This is really important, because only 15% of the Arctic has been sonar mapped. And sonar mapping is the only way that you can get a true and accurate reading of what is on the seabed. Satellite technology won't do it. So if you're going to start sending more ships up to the Arctic, which people are, for reasons we've talked about, then you're going to need really accurate sonar readings. And while you're doing those readings, you sometimes come across natural gas possibilities, mineral reserves. So while we were up one day, we were like trawling around in the boat,

• 19:06Speaker 01

  you know, sonaring an area about the size of Puerto Rico, and the NOAA captain who was doing this stops and is like, oh, wait, let's hone in on something. And she found what she called a feature, which was basically a methane-plumed volcano at the bottom of the seabed, probably a natural gas reserve. So that then has to go into the public database. Then you're going to get private ships, state ships, coming up there to explore the region. So all of those natural resources are now really up for grabs. And there's also a lot of rare mineral earth reserves. In fact, the largest amount of rare earth mineral reserves that have not been ring fenced by China are in the Arctic.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  What kind of conversations are happening in terms of preserving indigenous life? Not just animal life, but also native tribes? If I'm not mistaken, there are native tribes in Alaska that continue to whale hunt, for example.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  So what are the conversations that are happening in the US? And are you familiar with what those conversations are like in Russia and China? In other words, is there any embedded interest groups that are going to push for and succeed in pushing for and protecting the environment?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  And some of the native tribes that live there?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. So keep in mind that I was on the boat during the Biden administration. So the climate around anything to do with the environment or native tribal rights was very different politically than it is now. But one of the things that was fascinating is that we had to plan our journey so that we did not interrupt native whale hunting areas. Whales are super sensitive to sound and they'll run from, you know, what you're doing if they hear things. There was actually a native, they call them a native observer, a scientist named Clarissa Zeller, who was from the Yupik and Inuit tribes. And she was on board. She's a scientist, environmental scientist. And she was a native observer that would watch what the Coast Guard was doing and then

• 20:57Speaker 01

  give information about what the tribes were doing to make sure that, you know, whaling wasn't interrupted, to make sure that information was being exchanged. And interestingly, and I believe this is actually still true, the military takes a lot of information from native people about climate change. In the Trump administration, it's not that they're so much interested in the climate change, part of it, but they're interested in risk. They're interested in what's happening on the coasts, what's happening with weather, because that becomes a security issue. It's a risk issue. And a lot of the native populations have oral histories stretching back, you know, hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. And so they can say, okay, yes, we're noticing now a wave pattern that in the past has been

• 21:40Speaker 01

  associated with now three years of higher tides and flooding or drought in a particular area, you know, they can, they're on the front lines because they actually are still subsistence living on, wow, we're noticing major shifts in the salmon population or in how seals are behaving or where the whale hunting is going on. And so it's pretty fascinating that Canada and the US take a lot of information from native peoples, Russians and Chinese, not so much. And that's actually a very interesting geopolitical opportunity because as these areas that native people live in become more contested, become, you know, the areas of interest for commerce, it could be a soft power advantage, certainly for Canada, potentially for the US, to actually

• 22:25Speaker 01

  work more collaboratively.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Work collaboratively, that's a

• 22:28Speaker 01

  I know. Well, we'd have to start with each other, but

• 22:31Speaker 00

  We'll take Greenland from the Danes, but

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  We'll ally with the 100-person tribe up in the North Pole. What are some of the most credible projections for loss of sea ice and rising sea levels? I mean, how much have you looked into this?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I don't have the book in front of me, but I do have in the book quotes on the fact that what used to be, let's call it a week, two, three weeks of passage on a trans polar route, scientists believe that by 2030, 2035, that could turn into three months. So that tells you something about just how much pullback there could be during the summer season. Something I got asked a lot while I was researching the book is, well, wait a minute, aren't icebreakers actually making the situation worse because they're breaking the ice, you know, and isn't that bad for things? Should we limit? Actually, it's interesting, the less solid ice that you have in a region, the more you

• 23:24Speaker 01

  need an icebreaker to travel through because first of all, you can travel through and so people will travel through, but wind and wave patterns can still change really, really quickly in the Arctic. And I'll share a couple of weather stories with you. And you can very quickly, if you're not an icebreaker and you're just a normal ship trying to transnavigate these routes, you could quickly be surrounded by ice, stuck in ice. And then you're back to the sort of Shackleton, you know, stuck in those giant ice flows in Antarctica kind of, you know, picture that we've all seen.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  I had this impression before I read the book that icebreakers were essentially like tugboats, not that they were tugging ships, but that they were there in service of the rest of the fleet and that it sort of moved forward, broke the ice and the rest of the ships could pass through. But that's not quite right because in order to traverse the Arctic, as you say, there's lots of sea ice all over the place. You have to have a ship that can navigate that. So what does that mean in terms of commercial traffic? As the North Pole continues to become accessible, do you need to have those specific types of ships in order to engage in commerce itself? And so they end up taking on some of the characteristics that long haul freight containers or freight vessels or

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  a dry bulk or tankers do?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I love this. This is such a geeky question. I love it. It's already something that's happening because if you look at what icebreakers have been used for, the Russians, who actually had the Finns pay back their war reparations by building icebreakers in the post-war era, used these as oil transport mechanisms. So there are already icebreaking tankers that have been used for a long time by the Russians. That will become much more common. But as you say, freight icebreakers, cargo ship icebreakers, all of these things will become more common. You know, your point about using them as tugboats, that is still true for ships that are nearing, let's say during a winter, a ship leaving from continental Europe goes up to Finland, you might be able to send a normal ship there.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  And then when you get to the coast of Finland, the icebreaker comes out, tugs it back into shore, short distances. So that all, that all happens too. But, you know, it goes to the fact that the US amazingly has, at the time I wrote the book, one icebreaker in the Arctic. We now have three, but really only one that's still full-time operational. The Chinese and Russians together have almost 50. So that's why Donald Trump signed in this last administration, this deal to build 11 icebreakers by 2028 with the Finns. And that deal was actually something that was started by Trump in the first administration. The meat was put on the bones during the Biden administration with this memorandum of understanding and this kind of greater picture of what are the geostrategic possibilities here?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  And then Trump comes in and, you know, with his sort of limbic brain is like, we need more icebreakers. Let's just, you know, cut through all the deals and executive order for icebreakers. But I gotta say, I have watched those Finns build the ships. They are incredible and they have these, it's super cool. They have these little test, not little, Olympic-sized test pools that they freeze over and then they build models, like, you know, six-foot, 12-foot models of the icebreakers. And they create the conditions that they'll be breaking through. And then they play, you know, they literally play with them in these frozen swimming pools for six months before they ever build them and get them in the water for real.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  It sounds like a fun job.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does, actually.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  How does what's happening in the Arctic measure in importance relative to other contested areas like the Middle East, the South China Sea or Eastern Europe?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  So I see it as all part of the same thing, to be honest. I, as I wrote in Homecoming, my last book, the pendulum always shifts, the political economy pendulum, I think shifts about every 50 to 100 years. So you could go back to the 18th century and say, we had a lot of war in European countries, mercantilism, separatism, and that kind of went on until we got to the 19th century and you had our first wave of modern globalization and empire building. And that kind of went on until there's, you know, inevitably too much speculation and new technology, railroads at the time. Then you get the 1929 collapse and the pendulum shifts back towards more government intervention. And that goes and goes and goes until you get the Reagan Thatcher revolution, which is the last big shift. And now we are shifting again into this world that is not about globalization, but

• 27:45Speaker 01

  more about spheres of influence, regionalization, US, China, possibly Europe, some middle nations like Canada, European countries, you know, coming into alliance together, India, Turkey, South Africa. So you've got this big soup of potential conflict, but also potential cooperation across new regional spheres. And in each of those, you are seeing the US and China in some kind of edgy relationship. The Arctic is one of them, but look at the South China Seas. I mean, you know, one of the reasons I got so interested in maritime power is after I learned just how dominant China is in the shipbuilding industry and how many commercial ships in particular they have, which by the way, commercial ships do 90% of servicing for the military.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  So if you don't have a commercial industry, you're in trouble and the US doesn't.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  I was thinking, all right, if the Chinese really wanted to blockade Taiwan, is there any way that the US Navy could stop them? I don't think so, because even if you had the entire US Navy turn and go sail to the South China Seas, you still need 90% of their capacity, their deliveries, the things that they need onboard to be delivered by commercial ships, almost all of which are owned by China. And then add into that, let's say, an area like Latin America, where the US and China are squaring off over natural resources. You look at what's happened in Venezuela. That's in part a reaction to growing Chinese power in Latin America. China owns the largest portland in Latin America. It has bought up a lot of farmland in Latin America.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  So that's another sort of regional conflict. Again, maritime, very important. Then you can look at what's happening in Europe. European nations are, in some ways, trying to develop their own sovereign AI systems, resilient supply chains, but oftentimes saying, making choices, well, today, we're going to go with the US supply chains, tomorrow, we're going to go with the Chinese. So that is a very great game paradigm, because back then, you had the, well, not the UK, you had Great Britain and Russia squaring it off. And countries in Central Asia, Persia, India, they would sometimes come in and out of those conflicts, change sides, work together, not work together, and that's where we are now.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  But what about in terms of importance? So the Middle East has historically been a contested area irrespective of whether or not there was oil there, but certainly it became even more important during the industrial era and the age of oil. The South China Sea is contested in the sense that China has claims over it and the United States is yet to relinquish some of its interests. Eastern Europe, obviously, there's a war raging with Ukraine and Russia, the United States and NATO. Where would you rank the Arctic? Maybe not today, but like in terms of, is it going to compete as a theater?

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  A military theater?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  In the years to come?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  I believe it will. I think it will be probably in the top three, maybe top four, if you assume that the Ukraine war will continue on. I would say Middle East, South China Seas, Ukraine, Arctic, top four hotspots right now. And again, I think it could become even more important than that, and I'll tell you why. During the Cold War, the Northern Sea Route was highly militarized by Russia. That is now happening again. The Russians and the Chinese are conducting more and more drills in the area. They're doing more surveillance in the area. There are more submarines in the area. In the last three years, there's been drills off the coast of Alaska. And the race for resources in these areas, who is going to be able to claim that they

• 31:17Speaker 01

  own the rare earth mineral deposits 200 miles off their continental shelf? Who is going to be able to say, we're going to ring fence this particular commerce route because climate change is making it too difficult to pass through the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal right now, so we're going to use these Arctic routes? All of those things are going to put countries in combat with one another. And then add in Trump's, what I think is just an incredibly stupid trade war with Canada that is turning into a geopolitical conflict. And you see Canada becoming much more of an aggressive actor in the region, saying, you know what, we're going to get European countries to ally with us. And you saw this really galvanized by Trump's, again, really stupid desire to militarily take Greenland.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  And I wanted to pause there for a minute and say, Trump often has, comes at important ideas the wrong way. This is not to say Greenland is not strategically important. It is, it always has been, really since the 60s. It's been one of the kind of front lines for NATO Northern Atlantic security. There are ammunitions there, there's a lot of surveillance that happens there. The Greenlanders themselves are looking to become independent from Danes, probably in the next 10 years or so. And the thinking in certain defense circles in the US is, well, let's get ahead of this so that by the time they pull away from Denmark, it's not a free for all where they'll then make a mineral deal with the Chinese, or, you know, so like, let's get that influence going on now. But to me, the way to do that would have been to team up with Denmark, you know, or

• 32:47Speaker 01

  maybe some other NATO countries, and just come up with some sort of a tighter structure around Greenland that could be a way to, you know, create a more regional approach to the area. That is not what happened under this administration.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Do you feel like Trump's approach of tariffing allies and reprimanding them for, let's say, not participating and patrolling the strait, or threatening to seize Greenland, is a net negative or a net positive? The reasons why it could be a net negative are obvious, but the arguments for why it's a net positive is essentially that it's incentivizing and signaling to allies that they need to do more to become resilient and independent. Where do you fall on all of that?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think you're kind of raising a very important point, and I'm glad you did. A lot of times, Trump's histrionics, if you kind of go down past the rhetoric into what is really at stake here, he tends to land on something important. And I do think, if I were sitting in the National Security Council and I was saying, gosh, in five to 10 years, Greenland could be independent and they could cut a exclusive mining deal with China, and then you would have a lot of Chinese infrastructure right off, you know, the coast of the US, basically. Yeah, I do think that's a strategic issue. So signaling that is maybe a good thing. It's funny that by threatening to take over Greenland, Trump also signaled to the Europeans, hey, you better stick together.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  I mean, I thought that was the moment for a while that we might see the EU really coming together and saying, okay, we're going to be a serious union, we're going to really have tax transfers, and we're going to present a united bloc. It didn't happen. But I think he's landing on something important, which is that the Arctic, the high north, is now a place where, if you look at a map from the top down, which, by the way, all the maps on the Healy look from the top down, the geography looks very different. Russia is by far, it's 2/3 of the territory. China is a near-Arctic nation. It's not super close, but it's closer than you might think. And the US is small, Canada is big. So you start to think about the players in very different ways.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Did you do any work trying to interpret what the Russian and Chinese strategies are as they pertain to the Arctic?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. I looked into the polar silk route, which is, that's an official phrase that the Chinese used, I believe it was in 2017, 2018. They specifically came out and said in a speech that they were looking to create that pathway into and through the Arctic in the same way that the one-belt-one-road pathway stretches from old Chinese trading routes through Central Asia, the Middle East, and eventually even into Southern Europe and parts of Latin America. What they are doing is ring fencing global supply chains. They are ring fencing the infrastructure of globalization, and the Arctic is very, very much a part of that.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  And Russia being what I would consider a vassal nation to China, a large vassal nation with nukes, but still a vassal nation, becomes the vehicle through which the Chinese can exert that influence.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  So in the book, you highlighted this move from an old-fashioned approach to state craft to something more along the lines of sort of neoliberal economics and markets know best. And you also kind of made a distinction between an old sort of complexity-laden view versus the more deterministic, instructional, formalized, systematic view of policymaking, economic policymaking, politics, basically the move towards technocracy, and that we are going to revert back to that older system. Can you tell me a little bit about why that was important for you to highlight and what has led you to that conclusion and what that would really look like in practice?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I would say that all of those questions play to themes that I've been thinking about honestly through my entire 34-year career. And maybe I'll just take a minute and tell you about my own personal background. I grew up in the rural Midwest. My father was an immigrant from Turkey. He ran factories in the auto component supply chain in the Great Lakes area. We lived globalization from the 80s onward. We saw the consolidation of family farms and how those people left then to work in factories and how those factories were then closed when industrial supply chains were sent to China as part of a kind of cheap capital, cheap labor exchange that was going

• 37:15Speaker 01

  on from the West to Asia and US to China in particular. So I had a very felt experience of, huh, the markets and policymakers are telling people around me to make decisions that might save money for a few years and might give us a lot of cheap stuff in Walmart, but actually are going to be devastating for these communities longer term and potentially really bad for resiliency, security. I mean, you know, as a child of immigrants, I'm the kind of like, don't put all your eggs in one basket person. And so the idea of, when I started doing the work that I do and looking into very highly concentrated supply chains, like semiconductors, for example, that's been a

• 37:57Speaker 01

  big topic in the last few years, COVID hits and war in Ukraine hits, we realize, oh, gosh. 92% of all the world's high-end semiconductors, which is kind of the lifeblood of everything we're doing, in our Yeti mics, in our computers, in our shoes, whatever, are made in one very geopolitically contentious island. That's really stupid. I mean, even if we didn't have a US-China conflict, what if a tsunami hits Taiwan? What, you know? So it's like, that point about resiliency was always in my mind. And I always thought, why are companies and countries not building in a little bit of backup? And this is not about xenophobia or anything. I mean, I think China is an amazing country. I've been there many times. I think the Chinese have great policies for the Chinese,

• 38:42Speaker 01

  but they're a very mercantilist nation, and they're not looking to come into any kind of Western free trade system. So as all of those things, I think, became more and more evident, not only to me and academics who now study these topics, Danny Rodrick, Darren Ajmaolu, Simon Johnson, you know, all of whom have won the Nobel recently for work in these areas. Then we start to get experiences like the supply chain disruptions from COVID, the war in Ukraine, now Iran. And people start having a felt experience of, wow, choke points matter. Being able to pump your own oil matters. Being able to have your own rare earth minerals and biotech and pharmaceutical supplies.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  So if a soccer mom needs antibiotics and we're in a hot conflict with China, you know, we don't have a problem because China makes most of the inputs for antibiotics. That just started to become more and more part of the felt American experience and then part of the political conversation. And so, just as I was not surprised that Trump won in 2016 because he was able to say in that very first debate with Hillary, hey, free trade's not working, you know? And people that I grew up with are like, yeah, we lost our jobs. Our, you know, everybody we know is on opioids. Now, I think a larger percentage of America are able to say, wow, okay, we do need a little more resiliency. We do need to think about not policing the world

• 40:07Speaker 01

  and sending jobs in some kind of cheap labor, cheap capital bargain to very concentrated places. But let's think about how to navigate this new and more multipolar world, making sure that we can protect what is nearby, what is important. It's a big shift. It's the opposite of neoliberalism. I don't know what you call it yet, but it's basically moving from kind of efficiency, just get something from point A to C, doesn't matter how you do it, to resiliency, A, B, C. How does it play in security? How does it play in economics? How does it play for jobs?

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Is there a Trump doctrine, do you think, today?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's funny. A couple of years ago, the New York Post, who does great headlines, ran something called the Don Row Doctrine. They ran a map of when, when Trump was kind of getting all histrionic about Canada becoming a state and taking over Greenland, they made a map and said, this is the Don Row Doctrine. And what they were talking about was a reference to James Monroe, who was a president, 19th century president, that said, look, we don't want to get involved in European wars. We're not interested in policing the world. We're going to police what's in our backyard, what's in the northern and western hemisphere. And so, some folks started calling Trump's approach, which is a more regional approach, you know, we're going to pull out of the Middle East. We're going to let China kind of do its-

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Is that, is that, can I interrupt you there, Rana? Because I don't, you know, this is actually a conversation I've had with lots of people who disagree with me, very smart people that do this for a living. So I am in no way an expert on this. But I remember reading, was the National Security Strategy. And it didn't read that way to me. It read like the United States saying, we're going to lock down the western hemisphere and also, we're going to ensure that China doesn't take over Taiwan. And subsequently, the United States has initiated this open-ended war in the Middle East. So is this really true?

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Well, you're bringing up great points. First of all, yes, you're spot on. The security document, which is actually a really easy to read document, and everybody should read it, it's pretty clear, did say that, to me, it put most emphasis on western hemisphere, northern hemisphere. It did say, it mentioned Taiwan, but let's be clear. Let's again, think about the, the military hardware. I don't believe that the US can win a hot war with China over Taiwan. And many military leaders have said that. In fact, Hegseth has actually announced that during war games, it does not go well when they try and look at that. So they might say this in the strategic document, but I think the reality on the ground is, the US cannot hold Taiwan against China. I do not think that can happen.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  And I don't think Trump wants to get into a place where that is even a possibility of happening. To your larger point about the Middle East, it's a really, really important one. And I think what's happened is, by entering this incredibly ill-advised war in Iran, which Trump somehow thought, I think, was convinced by the Israelis that he could win quickly. It was certainly in their advantage. A lot of his own advisors did not want him to go in. Very quickly realized, this is not going to be won quickly, and it's not going to be won by even intense military effort. And that plays to something that, you know, I'm from the Middle East. My family's Turkish, my ex-husband's Persian. There's a saying in the Middle East, the West has the watches, we have the time. And believe me, the Iranians have the time.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Like, they can take as much pain as the US can dole out. They have shown that they can hold the hot, literally hold the high ground in the Strait of Hormuz. And I think they have fundamentally shifted the energy markets, which is why getting new trade routes becomes so important, because you're going to have to avoid this area. And by the way, the Chinese are the number one buyers of Iranian oil. They're not going to stop doing that at any point. But what I do think is going to happen is that in some, in some fashion, either during Trump's term or the next term, the US is going to have to tiptoe away from saying, we are somehow going to exert our will in Iran and deal with the fact that there's now a new and much more disruptive paradigm

• 44:10Speaker 01

  where the Iranians control this choke point and they can charge what they like for people to go through it.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  How do you think that's going to affect regional alliance structures?

• 44:19Speaker 01

  I think the US will eventually have less to do in the Middle East for a couple of reasons. Young people are not interested in Israel. If you look at the age divide over politics, older voters and older policymakers believe that Israel is a huge strategic priority. Younger people do not care. So that will eventually start exerting itself at the polls. The fact that the US is energy independent and an energy exporter will make it less important to deal with energy in the Middle East. I think what you're going to see is, China will be the major economic player now. Countries like Turkey, Iran, will become the major geostrategic actors. I think some of the Arab countries will do very poorly by the US pulling out. I think it's going to be a big mess,

• 45:02Speaker 01

  but it'll increasingly be less of a mess for the US than it had been in the past.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  So what is it, become largely Iran and Turkey that become the big regional players?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  I think so. I think those are the countries that will shape the geostrategic picture. China, however, will have an interesting economic effect in the region because if you think about, China becomes the biggest oil importer from Iran, possibly from the entire Middle East at some point. The oil dollar peg is a very powerful thing. Since oil was discovered and Americans were paying for it in dollars and the Saudis were pegging it in dollars, that has the power of strengthening the dollar, giving it a lot of global heft. The dollar is the global currency, but as the US pulls out of that region and the Chinese go in, it makes the RMB become more important in the global system, which is also, these currency wars are a part of this larger great game power struggle that's going on.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  What could that mean for an average American? Well, it's not like the dollar's going to collapse, but in the short term, as China exerts more influence and with each Treasury auction, foreign buyers buy fewer and less US Treasuries, it becomes harder for the US to service its debt load. That can have an inflationary effect. We're already seeing that with higher interest rates. That can mean that your mortgage payments become more expensive and it could mean that your dollar buys less when you go abroad.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  What do you think of the argument that in order to rebuild the American manufacturing, the dollar needs to be weakened?

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Well, it's not a new argument. You know, in 1983, the Business Roundtable wrote a letter to Washington saying, we want a weaker dollar because we, we need our exports to be more competitive. It's always been, as one French president once said, dollar is the exorbitant privilege and the exorbitant burden, right? It's a privilege because we all get to go to, you know, lovely holidays abroad and spend our dollars and feel very rich. Asset prices are high, people want to do commerce in dollars. That makes, it basically raises the standards of American living. But it's also really bad for our exporters. And so, I think we are going to be, as part of this big pendulum shift to a new political economy, I think we're going to be shifting

• 47:12Speaker 01

  to a much more multipolar currency world, a world in which the dollar will be still important, still probably the preeminent global reserve for some time to come. But you're going to see others in the basket. You're going to see more euros, you're going to see more RMB, you're going to see gold being hoarded. It's quite interesting that a lot of European nations, foreign nations, are pulling their gold out of the US and back home because they're concerned about having that safety asset. The US, meanwhile, is telling the Venezuelans, you got to put your gold in, in our vaults. So we're in a whole new world of currency right now.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I am skeptical of how useful it would be for the purposes of igniting a manufacturing renaissance in the United States to have a lower valued dollar, because labor is not as important an input today as it was in 1983. And the United States also imports a lot of the material and also intermediary parts and technology to actually do much of the advanced manufacturing that happens today. So it's more internationalized and it's difficult to change that. It seems like so much of what we're looking for, I mean, so much of today's conversation and the sort of economic implications of what we've talked about hinges

• 48:28Speaker 00

  on coming to a new, I don't want to use the word equilibrium exactly, but dynamic equilibrium around international security and the international security paradigm, because we're moving from the unipolar world to whatever this new world is, multipolarity, bipolarity-ish, you know, I don't know what it's going to actually look like, but it seems like until that happens, and until also we get a political consensus in the United States. And that's the other thing. I'm curious, you grew up in the Midwest, so these were issues that animated, and these were largely issues that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party spoke to, though of course, there were people, the Republican Party, Ross Boro famously in the early 90s, that spoke to this on the national stage. It seems like Steve Bannon, Pat Buchanan,

• 49:13Speaker 00

  but now they've become national security issues. So it seems that we're sort of developing a working consensus in the US. Do you think this is something that the Democratic Party is going to seize on in the upcoming elections? And who exactly is going to speak to these themes? Because this hasn't been the sort of brand that the Democratic Party has put forward in recent years.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  No, and it gets to this kind of what I think is a big existential crisis in the Democratic Party. I mean, we know the Republicans have gone through an existential crisis, Democrats have too, because they really haven't decided if they want to just be sort of Kamala light, you know, go back to 1994, get someone like Gavin Newsom to be the candidate and kind of say, we'll tweak a few things at the edges, but really, we still want everybody to go to a four-year college, and we want everybody to go into software development, and we don't really care about making stuff. And we're going to pretend like the security paradigm is less urgent than it is. Or are you going to have more of a labor-left, resilient

• 50:13Speaker 01

  C, maybe a Bernie Sanders-type guy that speaks to jobs and a more balanced economy and the idea that we are living in a world in which we have a strategic conflict with China? The problem is that progressives, or as I sometimes think about them, labor-left candidates don't have a candidate yet that speaks to that. AOC is not this person, sadly. You know, her visuals are good, she's got the name recognition. She's not somebody, I think she showed when she went to Munich, she's not somebody that understands these kinds of geostrategic issues deeply. She's also very polarizing. So you've just knocked out your kind of number one name recognition progressive candidate. You see with, oh, gosh,

• 50:54Speaker 01

  who was the guy from Maine that just got canceled? The lobster man, I'm forgetting, Graham Plathner. You know, someone like that might have been this kind of person, but you know, he's out. We haven't figured out yet, who is the person that can speak to all these issues and can authentically say, yes, I care about working people, I care about jobs. I do think that the midterms are an interesting testbed here, because you're seeing the candidates that seem to be doing well are populists, they're not centrists. And that's true on either side of the aisle. So to me, that says, no matter who the candidates are in 2028, we're not going back to a 1994, hey, like, why can't

• 51:36Speaker 01

  we all just get along? Let's go back to globalization, forget about the last like 15 years. And that's not happening. And it's in part not happening, because that's not what China's doing. I mean, I have to say, I disagree with the Trump administration about many, many, many things. But I do think that during Trump I, when Bob Lighthizer, the USTR, came in at that point and kind of just raised the scrim up on the US-China relationship and said, you know what, you can't keep just dumping cheap stuff into the economy, you can't not play by the rules and just expect this to kind of last forever. He was correct. And now the Europeans, since the US has tariffs on China, are getting a lot of cheap dumping, and they are starting to have these debates. They're getting both the hard-edged populism, but they're also getting the more constructive, hey, maybe

• 52:21Speaker 01

  let's build our own sovereign AI systems, let's have some of our own semiconductors. So that's where we're headed. I just don't know who the candidate's going to be.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  What do you think, you know, like, I've been dismayed, and heartbroken is not, I think, too strong a word to use. At the state of politics in America, the acrimony is disheartening, and it's difficult for someone like me and you, we, you know, grew up during the same era, to feel what it's like to live in America today. I mean, I so often enjoy getting out of this country, because I don't, you can feel the weight of politics and the discord when you get here. What do you think would be a unifying message? Like, what do you think that people would respond to, that Americans, the majority of Americans, a working coalition of Americans, are looking for, longing for, whether they want it or not?

• 53:11Speaker 01

  That's a great question. You know, I'll tell you, I wrote a piece recently, a few months ago in the FT. I was having dinner with a friend, and her husband had a business in a place with lower taxes than New York, but they wanted to live in New York. And he didn't want to come to New York because the taxes were higher. And it kind of struck me, it's like this conversation, and I could go and hear it in a much more extreme way, and Europe, well, you got to move to Malta because the taxes are lower, or you know, you got to move, you got to move to a red state from California. I just think that debate is the problem. The sense that nobody has any kind of sense of dedication to service, to community, to place anymore. And I wrote a column that said, you know, just pay your

• 53:55Speaker 01

  taxes, just quit moaning and pay your taxes. I mean, yeah, can you argue, can a billionaire argue that I can do better things with my money than the government can? Well, maybe, but where does that leave you? You know, you're like on planet Elon, you know, circling the son of libertarianism. And it's like, that's not a society, that's where we are. So I think we have to have a message of, we have the richest country in history, by many means, by many measures, I should say. We just have to look at the pie and divide it differently. And AI is putting that debate on steroids, because it's just intermediating jobs so quickly. But we've got a pie where 85% of the wealth is held in intellectual

• 54:38Speaker 01

  property, data, stuff that is owned by a very few handful of companies, fewer jobs are being created, short term, that is a powder keg. Like, that's revolution getting ready to happen. And I think that's got to be the message. How do we redistribute and also pre-distribute better this wealth that we've created?

• 54:57Speaker 00

  I mean, I sympathize with what you're saying there. I also think in some ways, it's putting the cart before the horse, because if you've got a corrupt government, or incompetent government, or a government that's not serious, simply raising taxes isn't going to solve the problem, it's going to make things worse. I feel like there are two things going on at once. Both, there is a, in general, like, there's been a decline in civic virtue in America, and that has led to things like, there's more selfishness when it comes to, I want to take care of myself, and I don't feel a need to. But I think also, people are responding to signals from the government. And so they're thinking, well, I don't trust the government, I need to make sure I protect my family and my friends. So I don't know that, yeah, I don't know that there's one simple, easy answer. But, and I don't know

• 55:41Speaker 00

  if it's enough, just if a politician's enough, or if you actually need a crisis in order to create a common sense of sacrifice. In other words, can you engineer this? I don't know.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  That's super interesting, because I think that one of the best things that we could do for ourselves, and it should be a bipartisan idea, is have a year of service. Because if you are out of your right-left silo, out of your geographic silos, actually working with other people, you pretty quickly figure out that, you know, there's a lot we agree on, we all kind of know the right things to do. I felt that on the boat, to be honest. And it was very nice, like, we were having a lot of conversations that were not right-left, that were, you know, people didn't have to watch their words so carefully. It's like, we're on this boat, we've got each other's backs. Like, if the 94 of us don't work together, we're not getting back to shore safely. So like, cut the BS and just get down to what matters. I think a year of service could help. And I agree with

• 56:33Speaker 01

  you, the Trump administration has done tremendous damage by undermining even the idea of rules. You know, I mean, the fact that there's just this, we kind of understand now, there's a pay-for-play economy. And how can we walk back from that? Can the next generation of politicians do that? Or are we going to need some total market meltdown coupled with an AI disaster to, through, after many years of turmoil, take us to a better place? I hope not. But one thing I will say, just to be historically accurate, but perhaps pessimistic, when you look at the last couple of pivot points, like, 1914 to the 1940s, that was a big political economy pivot point. A lot of bad things in there, a lot of turmoil.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  But then we came out into a very good place. So, you know.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  And my hunch is that, it's very difficult to make projections about what this is going to look like. But my sense is, you know, world wars, if we would just want to use this template, or large-scale conflicts, have up until now traditionally been places that are, you know, theaters, there have been theaters of war, where they're happening over there. And you send resources and people over there. And eventually, enough people die, enough resources are expended, that you come to some kind of, you know, new status quo. And it feels to me that the future we're going into is one in which the whole world becomes a battlefield. And this is because of dual-use technologies, but it's also primarily because of the interconnectivity of the world. And you, once you weaponize

• 58:04Speaker 00

  the planet, every system is vulnerable. And AI compounds that. And so, I don't know how long this will last for, I don't know how bad it could get. You could also argue that because we're all so vulnerable, it can only spiral so fast, or it can only get so bad. I don't quite know. But I do think that we have a ways to go yet to figure this out. And maybe that'll be the subject of your next book, Rhonda. Maybe I'll have you on here when the world is even worse shaped.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  When I can figure out how to come up with a mutually assured destruction paradigm for the world of US-China conflict and AI. Hmm.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  And all joking aside, I actually think that's really important. I think that a concept, a new concept of mutually assured destruction, I think that something like that will emerge in this new technological paradigm that we're living through. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is the first time I wrote a book on the subject of the Arctic. I knew it was important. So now I have the beginning of a roadmap. I highly recommend the book to everyone who's heard the conversation today, especially, you know, while we talked about some of the meat and potato aspects, you're going to get a chance to learn about the crew, and the Healy, and Rhonda's journey, and everything she learned from that experience. So thank you so much, Rhonda, for writing the book and for coming on the show.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks so much for having me.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.