On this episode of Faster Please!—The Podcast, I am joined by Dalibor Rohac. Dalibor is the director of global research at GLOBSEC and a longtime senior research fellow in international relations at the University of Buckingham. Recently, he wrote the book Unshackled, which focuses on how economic power is inseparable from geopolitical strength.
In our conversation, Dalibor and I discuss his new book and what growing strains within the Western alliance could mean for its economic and geopolitical future. We also talk about Europe’s defense posture and its struggle to remain competitive in the global technology race, as well as why trade within the Western alliance is critical to maintaining long-term Western prosperity.
In this episode:
* What defines the West (0:43)
* The changing West (6:04)
* The disappearing secret ingredient (12:54)
* A change in nationalism? (18:25)
* European regulation (22:56)
* Europe’s economic future (26:10)
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)
But for now here are some of the many highlights from the chat:
On defining the West…
For me, the West is not defined geographically, it’s not defined in ethnic terms, it’s not defined in cultural terms. It’s defined through adherence to a certain set of institutions that people like Acemoglu and Robinson would call inclusive economic and political institutions, and different scholars would have different names for them. But I think we see as meaningful the distinction between autocracy and liberal democracy, between free markets and state capitalism or a planned economy.
And I think countries that do have those sorts of institutions that have enabled the rise of the West—places like the UK and the United States—and the opening up of our political systems, they can be in Asia. There’s Japan, there’s South Korea, there’s Australia, and I think they are very much part of the West as much as we are here in Europe or in the United States.
On the potential of a changing West…
I think we can deal with troubled democracy in Hungary or democratic backsliding in Turkey. Turkey would be one of those cases where there has been a significant shift away from the Western alliance and away from democracy. But if we see a similar shift sustain itself in the United States, I think the world will be in a lot more trouble, even relative to the status quo.
On the West’s trajectory…
I see all these controls that you’re looking at blinking in the wrong direction. And I think there is some urgency with which we have to create intellectual, political coalitions to defend some of these things.
We might need to learn things, relearn things the hard way, but I very much hope that it won’t be necessary and that people will understand what is at stake. I think the most immediate pressure point is the federal budget. If you are spending more on financing your debt than on the Department of Defense, you’re placing yourself in a very poor position to fight a major conflict.
On Europe’s diverging defense mindset…
A place like Poland, which has been spending consistently between 3.5 and 5 percent of GDP on defense, which has a dynamically growing economy that has now joined the G20 group of most advanced industrial nations of the world, which surpassed Japan in per capita GDP last year.
Unfortunately, the further west you go, I think the more complacency you see. I was recently at a conference in Austria, beautiful place, lots of young German-speaking people, both from Austria and Germany, and I had the sense that people wanted to be left in their illusions. Much of the rhetoric reminded me of the stuff you would hear at conferences 10 years ago about multilateralism and just getting along and solving the climate issue and preserving the advances of the welfare state. There just wasn’t the same sort of urgency that you hear when you go further east.
On Europe’s position in the global technology race…
That sense that we have to facilitate the diffusion of new technologies if we don’t want to be left at the periphery of the global economy is getting stronger. I think people understand that Europe is not going to have its own frontier AI model and will instead remain reliant on American technology.
The transatlantic relationship is not in a good place, but there is no real constituency in Europe for aligning with China when it comes to technology and tech governance. The lack of separation between Chinese corporations and the Chinese state makes people uneasy, irrespective of their politics.
On the West’s retreat from trade…
The American turn away from trade and efforts at trade liberalization has coincided with an inward turn in Europe. The EU has found it increasingly difficult to get trade deals done, whether with Canada or, more recently, Mercosur.
When it comes to trade, though, I think we may be starting to see a reversal in Europe. And when it comes to domestic reforms, the dire international situation could serve as a catalyst for change at the European level.
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