Past and Present Power

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Peter Frankopan: In the West, we talk a lot about the fears and the threats and the dangers of overcooperating with China, whether it’s taking on debt, whether it’s about infrastructure projects, but, you know, we’re not willing to bring anything to the party ourselves. That process of engaging with other parts of the world has never been more important.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by my co host Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And What Could Go Right is our weekly podcast where we look at the world through a different lens, a lens of, yes, what could go right.

Because so much of the lens that so many of us look at the world through is the lens of what’s going wrong. And there’s plenty that’s going wrong. There’s always a lot that’s going wrong. There are a lot of crises, there are a lot of wars, there are a lot of elections that don’t go the way we hope, or descend into social and political division and chaos.

One of the things that we don’t do enough, and obviously I have my prejudices here, given my own professional and personal background, is look at the world historically, meaning, what is the context of our present? How do we get here? What have human beings done in the past? That is not the same, by any means, because history does not, I think, repeat itself, even as historians may, in fact, repeat each other.

But there are themes in the past and things that human beings have encountered that can be instructive, that can help us place ourselves in a greater context. So we’re going to talk to somebody today who has made a career of really looking at the world in a very big picture way, but also from a different perspective that has been typical from the perspective you tend to learn if you go to school in the United States or you go to school somewhere in Europe.

Emma, who are we going to talk to today?

Emma Varvaloucas: Today we are going to talk to Peter Frankopan. He is a professor of global history at Oxford University. He works on history and politics of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia, Iran, Central Asia, China, you name it.

Are you ready, Zachary?

Zachary Karabell: I’m ready, let’s do it.

Welcome, Peter Frankopan, or should I say Professor Frankopan?

Peter Frankopan: Peter’s fine. My students get to call me Professor, but otherwise, Peter’s fine.

Zachary Karabell: All right, so we don’t have to do like, you know, the Lord Great Honorable Sir Peter Frankopan.

Peter Frankopan: You gotta earn that stuff.

Zachary Karabell: Good to know. So you have ranged widely in your work, certainly geographically, temporally, conceptually, philosophically, from the distant past to the ever present present to the, I guess to some degree, unknown future. Let’s begin at the more recent work that you’ve done in The New Silk Roads, where you pick up the threads, which I use as a pun intended, of the past to point to the future to what we should be thinking about in the present and the future.

And you highlight, I think, in particular, the emergence of China, which had always been the terminus of, or at least to some degree, the terminus of some of the Silk Roads as the 21st century, which many people certainly pointed to. I wonder in the time since you wrote the most recent book and now, which I guess is about what, five, six years, whether that question of China, whether you’ve reflected on, because there’s now a lot of China skepticism.

I mean, China is clearly a global power. It’s a global economic power. It’s a global military power. Absent complete internal implosion in China, that’s not likely to change in the next decades. But there is certainly a turn of the world against the rise of China, some of which will clearly put some pressure on, on that arc and that trajectory, not determinant, right? I mean, China is still going to be a place of many people and lots of dynamism and lots of problems. I just wonder whether some of the shift in tone and some of the structural problems, whether you would have somewhat written differently, or is this more of a blip?

Peter Frankopan: I learned a long time ago that, I suppose, like an artist, once you put something on somebody’s wall, what they say about your picture, how they interpret it, it’s up to them. I mean, my book isn’t about China, the New Silk Roads, it’s about an attempt of a new world order that is trying to burst through, and so in that story, at the time when it came out, for sure, a lot of people were paying a great deal of attention to China, but I think I’d reinforce everything I said, which is that in the world of today and tomorrow, we should be looking at decisions made in places like Moscow, like Delhi, like Riyadh, like Abu Dhabi, like Beijing.

I’d add to that list now, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore, Tokyo, et cetera, that those are really the key points at which the New World Order is being made. You can throw in Jerusalem and what we’ve seen in the Middle East too. So while my continent, I live in here in Europe, is filled with history and it’s a beautiful place to go on a vacation, it doesn’t feel to me that the problems of today and tomorrow are being discussed or fought over or really matter what we want to think about in Brussels or Paris or Rome or London.

And that’s a really big shift because for the last three or four hundred years, Europe really was central. So I’d probably reinforce by saying those connections, I mean we’re talking as it happens while there’s a BRIC summit going on in the middle of Russia, where essentially the whole of the world that’s not white and the whole of the world that’s not European and Western has turned up to come and not just shake Putin’s hand but to hug him in front of the public eye to try to say that look, whatever Russia’s done in Ukraine, not only is that not a problem for our relationship, but the narrative of a new world order where the West is interventionist or isolationist or perhaps both, or self interested, it stands that this new narrative has caught on and has got stronger, in fact, in the last five or six years.

Now, China’s own macro problems, like you mentioned, Zach, they are substantial, they’re unpredictable. A lot of people have predicted the demise of China for many decades, and many predict its unstoppable rise.

But my job isn’t to be selling you one dream or the other, but it’s to be saying that history and politics is about fundamentals. And those fundamentals are, you know, east of Istanbul, it’s about 65 percent of the world’s population. And that means there’s lots of opportunities. If you’re selling laptops, books, pens, corn, wheat, meat, that’s your markets, particularly if they get richer.

Equally, if things go the other direction and there are problems, confrontations, fragmentation, you know, that’s where you might think some of the big problems might come from. But yeah, I think as we speak today at the end of 2024, I don’t think you could see it more evident of a world in transition where ambitions in the Middle East, in India, in South Asia, in China, in Southeast Asia, in Russia, are absolutely on full revolution and the narrative of the United States, again we’re talking just before the US election, is primarily about how does the US disengage from a perceived unfriendly world?

How does, how does America become great again? And the two answers being given essentially by the Republicans are just fall back on US first and to hell with the rest of the world. Or the Democrat view, which is a little bit softer, but it’s to say, look, we recognize that America needs to come first, but we still need to have friends in a few ports.

But that pulling back of US role over the 20th century is something that I write about in The Silk Roads. And, and again, the story at the BRIC summits across all of Asia, I’ve just been in Central Asia last week, is, is not that people don’t like the United States or the West or don’t respect its values, it’s that they’re not a relevant player in the big decisions being made.

And you know, that’s Saudi Arabia, that’s UAE, that’s China, that’s Iran. That’s Pakistan, that’s India. These are places that are very complicated, you know. They’re not necessarily straightforward. Their political models, ambitions are not to be more like us, but we have to respect that that world is on the move.

And I think it pays dividends to understand where these peoples have come from, what their transitions are heading towards, and in what ways we’re part of the story solutions and the problems. But I don’t think we’re doing that.

Emma Varvaloucas: Is this new world order, are they united around a common goal, or are they going in a common direction, or is it really like country by country, it differs, and you’d really have to talk about things at a national level to talk about what are the goals, what does the road ahead look like for this new world order that you’re talking about?

Peter Frankopan: I think a lot of politics and a lot of history is about creating a script. You know, and that script, let’s say in the 20th century, the United States was the American Dream. You know, that anybody could make it to the top regardless of their backgrounds, you know, immigrants were welcome. And in fact, you could do well in the United States and it was all about working hard.

And those stories have some truth to them, but also, you know, they’re, they’re seeing the world in the best possible sense. I think there’s a narrative around a new world order that falls on very fertile ground. You know, if you’re one of the 54 countries in Africa that typically don’t get included in major global summits, don’t get to show up at places like the G7 to talk about what the world’s going to look like in the future, then hearing that other people are paying attention to you is not just seductive, it’s actually important, right?

The voices of the Global South, or whatever you want to call the developing world, less developed economies. I think that that script of, we’ve been left behind, a lot of the problems are because we’ve been dominated, in some cases colonized, in some cases resource exploited, so some of it is the script.

But there are substantial, substantive and substantial things that are going on underneath the bonnet that are attractive to some of these countries. Some is about, decoupling from the US dollar, which is not just a pride issue, it’s about how can you do economic exchange without the value of the dollar being evolved, which is, which is significant.

As it’s happened in the last 24 hours, we’ve had the attempt to announce a kind of a food version of OPEC, where a lot of the BRICS countries are primary providers of global crops. And if you can agree to price fix, or keep prices high, that’s to the benefit of producers, and starts to distort the market in the way that OPEC was able to do with oil quite effectively in large part of the 20th century.

I mean, as it happens now, that’s changed because as we’re happening today, the United States pumps twice as many barrels per, of oil per day as Saudi Arabia does. So, when you see dislocation in the Middle East as we’ve seen in horrific terms the last, just over the last year, that’s had very little impact on the United States economy because oil blockades don’t really matter because the United States is more or less self sufficient for energy now.

So there are substantial things that are going on behind the scenes trying to find ways of common ground. But yeah, you’re absolutely right, Emma. A Shia theocracy in Iran has got not a great deal in common with a Marxist Leninist state in China, nor with a sort of top down, essentially czarist looking Russia.

And then throw in South Africa, throw in UAE, Ethiopia. Egypt that joined last year. Argentina had been given membership of the BRICS. They pulled out three days before they were supposed to join at the end of last year. But I think what unites all of these is that we’re not the West. We do things in different ways. We have different standards.

And some of those things are, like, we don’t believe in free speech. We don’t believe in equal gender rights. Lots of things that most of us think are quite important as fundamental human rights. We don’t believe in equalities of religion, and we believe in state control of almost everything and interventions.

And I think that that’s a very different model. So it’s different to the Cold War, it’s different to the free world versus the communist world, but something is being born that is, that has got substance and you know, we’re an observer here in the West. We’re not involved in those discussions, but we should follow quite closely because these will have very significant impacts, challenges, but also opportunities for us as well.

But yeah, there’s the headlines are, we can do things in a different way. We should reform the international rules based order. It’s wrong that the West is defending Ukraine but is not defending Palestine. It’s wrong that the United States intervenes in other countries but Russia or others can’t. And we need to have a better answer to those questions about why that has happened.

But you know, that falls on very fertile ground and it’s why half the world’s population haven’t condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and doesn’t want to get involved. It’s why countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have boycotted McDonald’s and Coca Cola, because of perceived ideas the United States are supporting persecution of Muslims in the Middle East.

And those things affect shareholder value. They have long escalator consequences that we’re too busy, I think, focused on Trump and Harris or Boris Johnson or whatever we’re thinking about. The lack of attention tells us that we think about the real world in ways that are distorted. And, you know, my job is to try to provide a bit of perspective.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I think that’s a really, really crucial point. And as you know, I mean, there’s a whole history here. It isn’t just BRICS, which was a Goldman Sachs global analyst creating an acronym for rising powers. It’s much more of this next chapter, what was the non aligned movement in the 1950s and 1960s were a whole series of, at that point, much poorer countries, basically said to both the Soviet Union and the United States, Hey, wait a minute. We’re not, we didn’t sign up for the Cold War. And the fact that you’re forcing us to pick sides. We may have to just because we, you know, we need access to both of you, but we have a whole different view of the world.

So in many ways, this is just the the latest iteration of that, right? This whole phase of what’s now almost a hundred year period of decolonization.

Peter Frankopan: It seems to me completely right that why would you pick sides? It’s like being in a divorce. Why pick mommy or daddy? Why pick Beijing or Washington? You ideally want both, and the worst thing is to be left just with one because you, you can be pushed to one side.

The problem is, is that in the West, we talk a lot about the fears and the threats and the dangers of overcooperating with China, whether it’s, you know, taking on debt, whether it’s about infrastructure projects. But, you know, we’re not willing to bring anything to the party ourselves. And I think you can’t have it both ways.

You can’t preach a moral game, but not put your hand in your pocket. And at some point I think other, other peoples and systems have worked out that provides opportunity to cultivate, to develop foreign policies, diplomatic ties, to invest in long term relationships. And you know, if you’re old fashioned like me, you call that foreign policy, you call that, you call that diplomacy.

And some of the competitors we have, rivals, friends globally, do that really pretty well. And we need to think harder about how do we keep a hat in the, hat in the ring, because, you know, it pays to have friends, but if you don’t invest in those friendships, then, you know, it’s very hard to pick things up and say, look, you should want to work with us because we share values, and you walk into the room and go, we’ve never seen you before.

So, you know, that process of engaging with other parts of the world has never been more important.

Zachary Karabell: I was in Georgia in the fall of 2023, and I was blown away going to the Georgia Russia border. There’s one road that goes to the Caucasus, the pass. And prior to February 22, there were like three or 400 trucks a day that would go through that pass. And already by the fall of 23, I think there were 1, 500 or 2, 000, and they were anticipating it would go up to like 3, 000 trucks and they were expanding the road and all that, because all these goods that, that, you know, would go from Turkey at one point into Russia or, or through Eastern Europe were down just circumventing whatever sanctions the Europeans have put on and we’re just like driving through the Caucasus, right?

And it was a very stark reminder of, if you were just listening to news in Europe and the United States, you’d think that these sanctions against Russia based on its invasion of Ukraine were severe and taking a bite. And I’m sure in certain areas they are with technology, you know, you can’t get an iPhone, you can’t get certain machine service. I mean, it’s all going to have incremental and increasingly punitive effect per se.

But the idea that like the whole regime in this country is going to collapse because of our sanctions, or that China is going to implode because we don’t sell it high end semiconductors, I just wonder in your travels, does that, because there’s a visceralness when you travel of like, hey, whoa, there’s a whole, there’s another narrative in a world out here that you can actually see and experience as opposed to the one we do here and are told.

Do you find that or is that, or am I being too facile?

Peter Frankopan: I was in Georgia a couple of months ago at the height of the protests, which in fact kicked off again this week because of the foreign agent law brought into Georgia where you had to, well, the struggle in Georgia about whether Georgia can get close to the European Union, and Russia’s poured resources into trying to push votes away from that.

In fact, we’ve had something very similar with a referendum in Moldova just recently, where for small amounts of money, Russia’s had, you know, enormous amounts of influence on, on, on the political systems. And I say that knowing that we’ve got ultra wealthy individuals, private individuals who try, their pronouncements in the United States changes the way people vote.

So, you know, it’s not, that that’s unusual. But Russia’s been very, very active in trying to spin a line that is going to have long term consequences for them. But I mean, from an economic point of view, sanctions can be great for people.

The war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia has been great for Mercedes dealerships right across Central Asia. It’s been great for India. India’s importing two million barrels of oil per day from Russia. Massive, massive boost in terms of the incorporation it gets with Moscow because India refused to condemn the war and as a result India get cheaper oil in bigger, in bigger volumes than ever before and that’s great for the Indian economy. That’s great for the Indian poor, great for Indian businesses and industry.

And so wars have these effects that you can pass sanctions, but it allows middlemen to get, to get rich quick. So, you know, the trade volumes that have gone through Central Asia, for example, and the Baltic states to reach Russia, you know, tells me that capitalism is alive and well. They’ll sell their own family members in return for quick profit. And those profits have been enormous. But yeah, if you want to get your German car serviced in Moscow or St. Petersburg, it’ll cost you a little bit more than before, but you get the parts no problem, even though we’re not supposed to be shipping those.

And these German car companies, amongst others, I suspect they have a pretty good idea that their dealerships in peripheral parts or next door neighbouring states haven’t just gone through the roof, but those things are going through to Russia too. So sanctions have that, have those impacts and they do affect, they did have an impact, particularly to start with when the Russians invaded Ukraine for the second time in 2022.

But at the moment, it looks like Russia’s economy this morning has been upgraded likely prospects by the IMF, to above three percent, so it’s about triple the rate of growth that we have in the UK, and, you know, the question is, when does the Russian economy run out of steam? Because the downsides when sanctions come in is that things do cost more, the government does have to sit in to try to control the economy, and governments are typically bad spenders of money, and they’re bad investors in innovation.

So, you know, but it’s been a long burn, and it will take a long time for Russia to be put under the kind of pressure that the European Union and the West hope will happen. I think nobody knows what the Russian objectives are in Ukraine, you know, it’s not that they get to a river, or a mountain range or a city, and they go right, now we’re gonna talk, now we’re gonna deal.

So far as anybody can tell, it’s like, we want to just knock Ukraine off the board, full stop. And that will keep going. I think most of my projections of my colleagues who work in this area more closely than I am, is that in around about 12 months time, there will be a set of crisis points. But nothing is linear.

China was hugely important in Russia at the start of the invasion, for the first nine, 12 months. It’s now less significant. Russia’s found lots of different ways to kind of boost its own resources. But because Putin doesn’t have clearly defined objectives, and the aim is basically to just create pain for Ukraine, and to create pain for the West, you know, he’s got quite a high reward for, I mean, it’s painful for the lives of conscripts and minorities in Russia have said to the frontline and for the Ukrainians having to defend them, but the, the appetite to that keep going doesn’t look that it’s gonna be exhausted anytime soon. But I think that does come a point in 12 months or so, if things keep going the same way, if American and Western support for Ukraine keeps on going, that, that, that things might start to wobble.

But for the time being, the Russians feel that the wind is in their sails and that there’s, there’ll be no point of having any negotiation because the Russians will feel that they can slice more salami off the roll, and take more off the table, and why bother settling now?

Emma Varvaloucas: Let’s move from one conflict to another.

I wanted to ask you particularly about the Middle East. I know, suave transition there. And I wanted to ask you about Iran, because you’ve written a lot about Iran, and what did people know about Iranian history to understand well what they’re doing now, and how they view the relationship with the West, you know, particularly with the United States and Britain, you know, in this vein of like understanding what is going on from the country’s own perspective.

I think we’re very bad with that when it comes to most countries in the Middle East. So Iran is a good one to start with since it’s in the news right now.

Peter Frankopan: There are lots of different ways of skinning the cow, lots of different ways to tell the story. You know, I suppose one way is Iran since 1979 for the last, for the last 40 years, 45 years, has simultaneously fought three cold wars with about 3 percent of the US defense budget. It’s fought a cold war against the United States, the Great Satan. It’s fought a cold war effectively against Israel, albeit with proxies. And to some extent, I mean, that’s changed a little bit in the last couple of years, but with Saudi Arabia too, its kind of nemesis and arch rival in the Middle East of theater.

So you could take the view that Iran has made a little go really quite a long way to enforce terrorist cells and things like with Hezbollah give support to places like Hamas and to the Houthis, that Iran has been quite effective in, in managing to be at a bat above its bat average because when you look at what Iran has at its disposal apart from oil, it’s got a sort of decrepit system of governance, almost impossible to rise up through the echelons. The IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards control more or less everything. The theocrats and the mullahs are able to use force whenever they want.

Occasional acts of resistance and uprisings get dealt with oppressively, you know, speak out against the regime and you get into trouble. On the flip side, Iran is a young country, it’s got incredibly passionate, clever, smart, young kids, as most countries in the world do, absolutely bursting with energy and ideas, a digital scene where you’ve got young entrepreneurs trying to stay out the way of the government, trying to stay on the right side of problems, but creating the new technologies, the new ways of communications, the new sort of new tools, kits, and so on, that, that make us all hopeful for the future.

And it’s incredible history, like you mentioned, Emma, that goes back thousands of years. Iran was the wheel on which Western Asia, if not all of Asia, turned. You know, it’s, it’s hugely significant from a strategic point of view, its natural resources, the way in which it tries to play through Russia, with China, with the Gulf, you know, it has got, uh, it’s got some, uh, reasonable skills to play with.

The flip side is Iran looks, at the moment, that it’s been pulled perhaps beneath the waterline, because of the eradication of the leadership of Hezbollah, because of what Israel done in the Middle East, in Gaza, and the West Bank, and now in Lebanon, and Iran doesn’t have too many cards to play. The question I think is going to be, what does Israel do next, and how will Iran respond to that?

But, you know, these are very unpredictable times. But those calculations of what might happen next, we’re now into a kind of, into the endgame where the consequences are going to be potentially extremely dramatic either which way. It might be that things fade away and that there’s sort of negotiations around the side, there’s evidence of a little bit of that happening, but you know, I think we’re all, we’ll wake up every morning, very concerned to see what’s happened next.

And it’s unpredictable.

News Clip: The U. S. is investigating a security breach that led to the alleged leak of classified documents about Israel’s plans to attack Iran. The materials became public over the weekend on the messaging app Telegram. The documents first reported by CNN and Axios detail weapons transfer is allegedly intended for a strike on Iran.

They also say the U. S. is aware of recent Israeli military exercises conducted in preparation for a possible Iranian attack. A retaliatory Israeli strike has been expected since Iran fired nearly 200 missiles at Israel earlier this month. Iran says those airstrikes were in response to Israel’s increased attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the assassination of the group’s leader.

Zachary Karabell: So I wanna ask you a more meta question. You’ve been a historian, right? Or I suppose you would say “an historian” to honor the Queen’s English. And there is certainly a tendency or a trend. It’s true in the United States. It’s true in the UK of people kind of emerging from an expertise, particularly in history and becoming more public pundits.

And I say that respectfully, not, not pejoratively. So from Arnold Toynbee to contemporarily Niall Ferguson or Simon Schama, and you’re, you’re very much in that cohort and legacy, you know, you’ve gone from being, again, an academic writing big sweep history, but still that to a much more public figure and as we’ve been talking about for the past 20 minutes, you know, talking a lot about what’s going on in the world, what do you feel is the tension in academia about that?

Academia is not always comfortable with people, as it were, either stepping outside their lane or taking their designated one lane road and making it into a very large, you know, M1 motorway or multi lane expressway.

Peter Frankopan: Well, so I’m not quite sure what exactly you’re asking me, Zachary, whether it’s kind of, uh, do academics get annoyed?

I mean, I think that the people you mentioned are much more visible than I am, and I’m reasonably, reasonably happy to stay in the shadows. But you know, I, there were a lot of worlds I work on, whether it’s the war in Ukraine, the Middle East, and so on, I can see daily what suffering looks like. And so people getting a bit annoyed by, well, they’re making coffee and, and, you know, outside the library about an academic being too visible.

I don’t think that, that makes me too worried about the, the grand scheme of human suffering. You know, academics can have very thin skins as well.

You’re right, one of the problems, I think, is if you work as a historian like I do, my training is to work with stuff that’s fact based, things from the past, and to interpret, and where the tension point comes about trying to project what happens in the future.

And so there are only two ways around doing that. One is to stick to fundamentals and the second to disengage as much as you can or to be as woolly as you can about what might happen next. So with things like BRICS or Iran, the potentials, you know, I’m trying to give as neutral a view as I can, which is, you know, there are variables and unpredictabilities and so on.

But, you know, underpinning it, what a good historian learns early on is that sticking to fundamentals of things like population, of energy supplies, of where do your carbohydrates and calories come from, about water and sanitation, about what’s your ecological ability to stay, to keep growing, you know, where do resources change, how do people fight in the past, some of those provide good questions to ask about the present and the future.

So, there is an absolute distinction between being a historian and writing about the past and trying to commentate in real time. But you know, one of the challenges I think in my world is that we’ve got lots of great Russian specialists, not too many on the Middle East, not too many on China, but very few who want to look across different arenas and different periods.

But I would like to think being invited on a podcast like this is a, is a, is a form of flattery of saying that, you know, you tend not to get asked if what you’re saying is rubbish or people disagree with it. It’s trying to give a perspective without offering certainty. And it’s trying to give room to explain that there are different ways of seeing things and that, you know, you don’t have to pick black or white. You can sometimes navigate through by allowing a different way of trying to understand and seeing the past as well as the present.

And like I said, guessing forwards, it’s a mugs game. And if actually, as it happens, historians are very bad predictors of the future, much worse than taxi drivers. And, you know, measurably so, you know, I’ve looked at research that just because you have PhD initials after your name, and you know, you know about history, it can make you overconfident about your abilities to predict.

But I think in terms of trying to provide perspective and context for what’s happening in today’s world, It’s probably not a bad thing that historians and geographers and others break cover and try to be a voice that explains where we are because it would seem to me some of the others who are doing that in our political daily life, you in the United States, us in the UK, cause a lot more problems than a bunch of boring historians arguing about parallels with the 18th century.

Zachary Karabell: Let me push you a little bit on the academic part. It’s not just the petty carpings of people over the water cooler who are envious of or resentful of someone stepping outside of their lane or having a wider scope. It’s, is the outcome of your particular career in spite of or because of?

Is it, is the outcome of academia supposed to lead in the direction of applying that knowledge to greater problems? Or are those like you who do so, do so in spite of a huge inertia and let’s say collective that says don’t do that.

I mean, I obviously have my own views of this. I’m an ex academic. I left academia rather than staying in it. I did the PhD and said I can’t do this, but I do think it’s important given the role that universities play, particularly in the United States and Europe.

Peter Frankopan: I think a lot depends on each individual and also exactly which topic, you know, I learned a long time ago that just because someone gets in touch and asks for an opinion, you don’t have to give one, particularly if it’s not something you know about.

I mean, I applied my trade being a jobbing academic, working on things that I thought was interesting and important and in fact, it sort of, my life slightly changed because we were, my wife and I had been invited to a charity fundraiser for a local state school here in the UK that we couldn’t go to, and I thought, thank God we can’t go and we got something else instead, and my wife is much, much more generous than I am, put in a couple of bids for auction prizes, one was a mug made by somebody else’s child with your name on it, we’ve got kids of our own who can make mugs with our name on, but anyway, and another one was for a consultation with a literary agent, and we, you know, got rung up the next day by the school saying, you’re the only bidder.

So I said to my wife, maybe you should go and speak to the literary agent, because for sure as hell, no one’s interested in what I do, and I knew that, and there was no problem writing about pre Mongol steppe nomads across Indo Eurasia, or talking about the, you know, frowned frontiers between Islam and Christianity in the 7th century, or thinking about, you know, what happened in the 20th century in the Soviet Union, in Uzbekistan, or Azerbaijan, you know, I didn’t I’ve got lots of friends who are academics, and not even they thought that was interesting.

But anyway, I rang Catherine Clark, who became my agent, and she said, look, what is it you’re working, you know, what is it, why, all the things you could have chosen, why did you choose this? And I told her, she said, I thought that’s quite interesting. And I went, I think it’s interesting, but I don’t expect anybody else does.

So I wasn’t trying to break doors down, and to be a boy wonder, trying to say that I had solutions and answers. And then when things got going and I got a bit more visibility, I got drawn into a few policy things with things like the UN where they, you know, one of the UN agencies got in touch with me and said, come and talk to us about why cities fail, right? We’re trying to think about the future, how do cities fail?

And I went, that’s a really tough question. There’s no single answer. And they went, great. Come and tell us about why cities have failed in the past. And, you know, like, like you, Zachary, as an academic, I don’t know, maybe you’ve got a, maybe you’re an academic too, Emma.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m not.

Peter Frankopan: Such a tough question. I’m going to wait for an easier one to come up. But then I thought, you know, why, if I’m a professor at Oxford, surely that’s what somebody like me should be trying to do some of the time. And so I went to a conference on, uh, with UNIDO, the Industrial Development Organization of the UN, to give some kind of parameters about why is it that some cities have struggled in the past.

Often there’s an ecological, environmental, demographic, or disease environment. There’s a whole set of different factors. But the point was, I think, to try to think, okay, you shouldn’t be embarrassed about sharing insights. If your insights are no good, then you don’t get asked back again. But you, you know, you can’t just have the privilege of writing about things in the past because they’re beautiful. Because I think they’re interesting and I could find someone who will fund my research.

So I think that there are tensions in academia for sure about what it is we should be doing. Over the course of my career, I’ve been in Oxford now 30 years, more than 30 years, we spend a lot more time thinking about the teaching side as kind of customer facing, what kind of rights do the students have, what kind of, what kind of service should they get from us, what kind of outcomes should they have.

Rather than, you know, what some of us think, maybe university’s first priority is world class research, and how do you do that in the best possible way? But, you know, a lot of the work I do doesn’t get published or spoken about, and I don’t get asked on the podcasts, but I’m totally okay and comfortable about that.

The visibility stuff, as you know, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s not always easy for colleagues to see other people in the public eye, but I’ve never had any pushback. I’ve only had support here. And if there’s sort of dark mutterings, you know, they’re kind enough or generous enough to be in corners that I don’t hear about.

But you know, I think if you if you if you try and try to do things in the right kind of way, there are lots of academics who do look at the limelight and maybe that’s part of it. But I’ve just been lucky that the path of the world I worked on, I’ve been on the move and you know, if anybody can do a better version that, you know, I’d be delighted to sit back and watch cricket and tennis and take life a bit easier.

But, you know, I also think it’s part of being an academic is communicating to the general public. We get benchmarked now formally like that in the UK that it’s a job we can’t just be talk priests talking to each other we do need to have some kind of public engagement.

Emma Varvaloucas: For our listeners that haven’t read The Earth Transformed, maybe you could explain that. The ecological catastrophe angle and humans, right? The history seems to be ecological catastrophe either not caused by us or caused by us, a bunch of us die, however we survive and thrive again.

Do you think that pattern is going to be applicable for now that we’re facing climate change, it’s going to be like a bunch of us are going to die, but we’re going to push forward, or do you think that we’re actually going to figure out how to live sustainably, like perhaps for the first time in human history?

Peter Frankopan: What I do in Earth Transformed is that I do, I do, I cover four and a half billion years. So the world since the creation, so per dollar, it’s about a dollar per 300 million years, which is better value than any fast coffee place you can get a good flat white from.

The starting point, Emma, with that is that, when we think about history, we start normally with the, like, ancient Egypt, so about four or five thousand years ago, and the starting point, I think, about the climate, the environment, is that for the majority of the Earth’s existence, unless you’re one of those people who doesn’t believe in geology and plate tectonics, et cetera, the majority of Earth’s existence, our life form wouldn’t have been supported on this planet because the oxygen levels were too low and the temperatures were either normally too low rather than too high. You know, snowball earth, no one could have survived, nothing could have grown, no plants, etc.

So we forget that humans, because we think of history as only about kings and queens and rulers and great men, great women and civil rights, we forget that we’re an animal as well. We’re a biological species that, like all biological species, lives within the constraints of the hand that Mother Nature deals us, which is why it’s generally more agreeable to spend time in upstate New York than it is in Mauritania or the Western Sahara or the Gobi Desert, because finding food is difficult, you get baked by the sun.

So, we understand that the physical environment and the natural environment around us is absolutely crucial, and as those things change for us, it’s not that we get wiped out like the dinosaurs, it’s that you know, your investment patterns and investment decisions might change.

So, for example, because of the big hurricanes that now come through Florida, the scale of things like Hurricane Helene and so on, the amount of damage they do means that insurance premiums rise up, so for an investment decision, you might not want to live in Florida because your risks to life and to your property are higher, and we as humans have the capacity to decide whether the benefits of the 11 months a year we don’t have hurricanes, it’s worth it, or you take your chances that you’re not on the hurricane’s path.

But I think we’ve, we’ve decentered geography and the environment and the natural world away from the human condition to the extent that, you know, most kids aren’t taught how to grow a carrot or a potato or where, you know, they don’t understand where meat comes from. You know, you know you, how, how you can survive in the wild.

You know, it’s a very niche part of American culture, I know with the, you know, frontiersmen who can skin rabbits and so on, but we by and large, we buy stuff without thinking where it comes from. We don’t think about supply chains. We don’t think about the, the impacts that it has on the environment. And I think that those mean that we, we find it hard to conceptualize the world around us.

And that gets exploited. So, of course, in politics and political discussion, the ideas about climate change or the environment, they’re so abstract that they become kind of, are they real? Is this change even real or does it matter? But yeah, I think that the thing when you, when you take a step back and you, you try to approach it sort of calmly, then I think there’s fundamentals about where does our food supply come from?

Where does our energy come from? What happens to our water? What happens to our disease environments? In a changing world, you know, a warming world, where we’ve had record temperatures every single day for the last 18 months in Thailand, we’ve got off the charts temperature break, breakthroughs, you know, ocean temperatures as well as global averages, those do, those do have consequences, and it’s not like a film, where they suddenly hit and, and, um, suddenly there’s disaster, but even those events that do happen are happening more regularly and more intensively, so I just think it’s worth understanding how those patterns in the past have changed the world, and you know, things like the volcanic eruption in 1815 in Indonesia caused the first great recession in American economic history, because big events like that affect photosynthesis, they change the harvest season. When harvests fail or are shorter, then prices go up, that increases inequality. That can create all sorts of social pressures, in the worst cases, revolutions.

And lo and behold, when you start to look for it, then you see, well, hang on, maybe the French Revolution wasn’t just about people waving a red, white and blue flag and complaining about the king and eating cake or whatever we’re taught in schools. It’s also because the price of wheat and the price of wine had doubled in the eight months beforehand, because of bad harvests, and in fact, American growers couldn’t ship wheat across the Atlantic fast enough, which caused compression in markets in the East Coast, because then prices went up there, too. So those ways, I think, of integrating the natural world pays dividends of thinking about, you know, the past, the human past and even before as well.

Zachary Karabell: So, when we look at the world today, and you compare it to the past, there’s a present tense bias of we live in this chaotic, violent, you know, world where order is crumbling, right? I think that’s a kind of a common feeling that there’s a world of chaos and threats. When you look at just thousands of years of history, are you much more sanguine about the present?

Do you feel the present is indeed teetering on a dark age? I don’t even know if the dark age is an actual category that we should think about. I know there’s a whole trend now in academic history to recast the dark ages in Europe as the bright ages, right? That we’ve been getting it wrong, you know, that there was a much more complicated tapestry and we, we sort of bought into some 18th century, what was it, Zwingli or whatever his name was, who like, we bought into a narrative that was wrong.

Peter Frankopan: It’s great to be provocative, right? I mean, look, you could, again, you could, you could look at that in lots of different ways. I suppose it feels like we’re on the point of precipice and apocalypse and, you know, who knows, that might be right, but I’m not a gambler, so I’m not here in the casino to tell you that that’s going to happen or it’s not going to happen.

But however bad things might get, I would assume it won’t be as bad as 90 percent population loss of indigenous Americans in the, in the 1500s. I would like to think it’s not going to be as bad as the Great Leap Forward in China with maybe 45 million people starving to death. I’d hope it’s not as bad as the horrors of the Second World War and the persecutions that led to the Holocaust.

So, you know, if you want to, everyone wants to think about magnified, catastrophic events, you know, the Black Death, probably 40% population loss across Europe and the Middle East, maybe even West Africa and China to in the 1340s. You know, there are all sorts of things that tomorrow might bring that would be terrible.

But let’s hope it’s not as bad as those. But if you’d want to look at it the other way, the fact that those have happened so many times in history, the fact that there have been these kind of breakdown events that have led to so many people dying in warfare, or through disease, or through catastrophe, or through harvest failure, or through famine, or through genocide, the fact that that’s such an important, those are such important themes in human history, would tell me that probably we’re not going to be immune from those in the future because we’re no smarter than people in the past.

We’ve got different tools, but we should be very aware of what the consequences are of those kinds of mass suffering of events. And if you’re a historian, one thing you might be trying to advise governments is to say, what are your fragility points? What are your vulnerabilities? What are your worst case scenarios around those metrics?

And the big ones for me are, like I said, it’s water, it’s calories, it’s energy, disease environments, then how you defend yourself against threats is obviously a key, key challenge. So it does look like we’re in a tricky place. But there’s also lots of really good news in today’s world. You know, lots of good news about women’s right to control over their own fertility, the way that women survive childbirth in every single part of the world, the fact that while we’re talking on this podcast, any woman who gives birth, the chances of the mother and the child surviving childbirth are greater than any point in history and that child that’s born will have the longest life expectancy in human history.

Now, my colleagues will tell me that there are still lots of women who die in childbirth and still lots of children who die in childbirth, but it’s better than it was. There’s still a way to go, but that’s the triumph of medical sciences, that’s the triumph of compassion, of humanities, investment, innovation.

And you know, one would like to think that that can continue, but it takes one decision by one person, almost certainly a man, that suddenly brings everything to a close. You have the big red telephone, the big red button that’s on more and more desks today than ever before to unleash nuclear, biological, chemical, radiological, so those capacities are significant, and we’ve learnt, unfortunately, four years ago that a single bat in the wrong place at the wrong time can cost millions of lives and put trillions of government debts that then escalate some of the social and political problems that we have as a result.

So none of those are going to go away, but history can teach you how to learn from how to deal with things. I mean, again, during the pandemic, I exhausted myself talking about how quarantine and virus detection in Milan and Venice in the 1600s was better than it was in New York and London in the 21st century. I’d been in number 10 Downing Street about a month before the pandemic started to warn about pandemic disease and the lack of investment in response to information about pandemics. So you knew what’s coming towards you.

So, you know, there can be a value in trying to pick up on some of those fundamentals. So if you were to ask me if I’m optimistic or pessimistic, I’d say I’m neither. The job of a historian is to be sober, drink lots of coffee and be pragmatic by trying to kind of assess what’s real rather than the kind of the fluffy narrative of what politicians are trying to promise us about the future.

Zachary Karabell: No flabby narratives, and be sober. I want to thank you for your work and your scope and your thoughtfulness. I think, you know, the role of history, just historical literacy or history awareness, we can probably all agree could be better. There’s a lot of urgency in a lot of countries for better STEM education, you know, more science, more technology.

There’s less push these days collectively for better historical education, just as a way of, I find personally, a view of history can be comforting. Comforting not, and very much as you ended with, Peter, comforting not as, oh, things will be fine, but comforting as, you know, human beings have fundamentally faced a range of existential crises over time and have met them in a range of ways, and here we are in our version of the same thing. Different tools, different specifics, similar challenges of elemental human nature.

And that that past is informative. It’s not necessarily, doesn’t dictate a course, it doesn’t provide easy answers, but it does give you some sense of, everything of the present is not new, and that I find helpful. Lots of people may find it alarming, useless, you name it.

But I want to, you know, again, thank you for the work. Keep doing it. I think it’s really vital and important that informed people take an informed look at the world today. So. Thanks for your time.

Peter Frankopan: Thank you very much for having me.

Emma Varvaloucas: So that was wide ranging, as we promised. He said that humans are no smarter than they used to be in the past.

I was, I’ve been fiddling around with that question recently, like, have we learned anything as a species? Better tools, as he said, but no smarter, by which I imagine he means that we are vulnerable to the same kind of vulnerabilities that humans have been throughout time: greed, lust for power, all kinds of different things that lead us to make kind of dumb decisions.

But I do wonder sometimes, like, are we ever going to get better?

Zachary Karabell: I mean, not just greed and power, but like elemental stuff of powerful need for security, you know, powerful need for the absence of palpable daily fear, right? Those are the same, those are still deeply animating in many societies. And you see that with fear of crime and fear of immigrants and fear of loss.

It’s also this, you know, crushing need for security, and deep, deep disinclination to live with uncertainty and fear, unknown outcomes. That’s also part of the mix. And now we have, of course, tools to magnify that, ways to communicate it, transparency about other people around the world struggling with the same things in real time, which is, I think, a new aspect of the present.

So, you know, we, obviously we’ve talked a lot about what’s the role of technology in all this. I think it’s more of a magnifier of the same, which potentially could create the new, but it’s the, it’s the degree to which, yeah, like human nature remains largely the same. And yet we’re much more aware of other people’s human nature than we ever have been.

So, but it’s great to talk to somebody who’s been, you know, essentially, literally ranges around the world. And I think this idea of, we need to force ourselves into the perspective of a lot of the rest of the world. And these questions that seem so, kind of perplexing if you’re sitting in large parts of the United States or Western Europe as to why the rest of the world doesn’t condemn Russia, right, for Ukraine is, is really important.

It’s not just because of Russian grain and Russian oil. You can’t just explain it by that because there are whole parts of the world that are, kind of don’t need Russian grain and Russian oil that are equally unwilling to. And it’s not because those cultures have no notions of right or wrong. It’s just their sense of the balance of power in the world, and the struggles between great powers over the past century has shaped a very different view of what’s going on contemporarily.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I mean, Robert Wright, who’s a member of The Progress Network, long time journalist, he’s a big advocate of this, right? It’s kind of like cognitive empathy for foreign policy, meaning like if you want to understand why countries do what they do, the best thing is just put yourself in their shoes.

Quick knock on the media. I think that we are pretty bad about explaining that to people, by and large. The kind of like in depth discussion that that would require seems fairly absent nowadays. Like, hey, like, what do people in Mauritania think about the invasion of Ukraine?

It’s probably not a topic that a lot of people would click on, but actually it could be, like, very interesting.

Zachary Karabell: And we don’t do that well domestically. I mean, that conversation we had with Musa al-Gharbi was just largely on that, right? It’s, it’s our version of that in the United States is like, Trump is evil and bad. Why don’t people see it? The version globally is Russia is evil and bad. Why don’t people see it?

And if you begin with the first question, you’ve really sort of path dependent, narrowed what the sec, what the answer is going to be, because you’ve sort of started with, it is patently obvious and morally unambiguous that X is true, so why doesn’t the world perceive it to be so?

And that doesn’t do you anything to then understand why the world doesn’t perceive it to be so, because you’re trying to answer essentially, like, why are they wrong? As opposed to, what are they seeing? And those are very different questions, right? I mean, they may be wrong, you may be right, you may be wrong, they may be right, but that doesn’t get you to what you just, what, right, and what you just talked about is cognitive empathy.

And someone like Frankopan, who, you know, he spends a lot of time just kind of looking at the world from a different starting point, literally geographically different. If you didn’t center everything in Europe, and then I guess presumably the United States, if you didn’t center everything in Western civilization, what would the world look like?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, the additional trouble to this too is that the thrust is very much away from establishing cognitive empathy. Like the fact that you would even not take as the premise that Russia is evil or bad, and I’m not saying that I disagree with that. So yeah, that’s the thing. You have to caveat, I have to caveat that to even continue on in this conversation.

The thrust is against, right? Like if you were like, let’s just like, reexamine our premises here. Whether you’re talking about something like Trump or Russia, China, what, whatever it may be, Iran, people automatically are like, are you defending that? And it’s like, I just want to have a conversation about trying to understand where they’re coming from.

And that doesn’t mean that I agree with it. I’m just trying to understand it.

Zachary Karabell: Tough. It’s tough, right? I mean, I guess you could start with the, it is rarely right for one sovereign nation to invade another, which was kind of the premise of the United Nations and a little bit the premise of the League of Nations.

In which case, Russia is wrong, and morally wrong, and so is the United States in Iraq in 2003, and maybe, maybe so is the United States in Afghanistan in 2001, I mean, so you can’t have one moral opprobrium, and it’s the, it’s kind of the cherry picking of moral frameworks that is the most egregious to much of the rest of the world, which is not that they think these things are right, but they think the United States in particular has been astonishingly hypocritical in its application of a moral framework. And the one place that it never applied its own moral framework to it is itself, except maybe for a period of the 1970s where a percentage of the United States questioned the invasion of Vietnam and the long war there.

So anyway, other conversations to be had, and I’m sure we will continue to have them, but this idea of, let’s, let’s kind of recenter where we’re looking, reframe the questions we’re asking, and stop from this perspective of, you know, they’re wrong, we’re right, why? And I think that’s a really vital contribution that Frankopan has made that we should all think about.

So, thank you for listening today. As always, send us your thoughts, your comments, your ideas, your complaints, your suggestions of topics that we haven’t covered that we should. Obviously, we cover a lot, but we don’t cover everything. Not that we should cover everything. We take your time commitment to us seriously. We are honored by it and we will continue to try to earn it.

And thank you, Emma, for co hosting, The Podglomerate for producing, the team at The Progress Network for providing the raw material that hopefully we do something good with, and we will be back with you next week.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks everyone, and thank you to Zachary.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? is produced by The Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by The Podglomerate. 

To find out more about What Could Go Right?, The Progress Network or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. 

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