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New Thinking for a New World - a Tallberg Foundation Podcast
03/03/22
•32m
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Wars have cycles: sooner or later, the fighting ends and the negotiations begin. As hard as it is to imagine amidst the unfolding tragedy of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the diplomats and politicians will eventually gather to define new borders, behaviors, and rules. The Russian attack shattered the European security structure that had evolved after the Cold War ended; something must replace it.
Of course how the fighting ends will shape whatever negotiations ensue. But it is never too early to think about the future contours of the map of Europe.
This podcast with Emma Ashford, Washington-based Atlantic Council geopolitical expert, was recorded before Russia attacked Ukraine. Nonetheless, Emma's thoughts and speculation about a new security structure for Europe are even more important now than when we discussed them before President Putin chose to go to war.
Please let us know what you think about this episode of ‘New Thinking for a New World.”
Previous Episode
Welcome to the End of Democracy
February 24, 2022
•32m
"We may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the noisiest of dictatorships.”
Those words were written by Joel Kotkin in a recently published essay on democracy’s demise. Donald Trump is not the villain of the piece, as most pundits want us to believe, nor other populists outside the United States. Rather, Kotkin argues that the withering of democratic process and institutions reflects the deeper transformation of American and European societies: the emergence of a ruling technocracy; the use of the pandemic and the environmental crisis to constrain individual rights; the new concentration of power in governments, and the growing distance between the governing and the governed. All of it made worse by the mind-boggling concentration of economic wealth, which is as much an issue in China as it is in the United States.
Kotkin’s analysis deserves our attention. What do you think—not about Trump, but about democracy? Who can do what to bend the arc away from the dystopian end game that he and others describe?
Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in California and Executive Director of the Urban Reform Institute, as well as the author of the Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class.
Next Episode
Special Edition: War in Europe
March 8, 2022
•64m
Most of us thought the war in the Balkans would be the last conflict in Europe; the last time that armies would invade, civilians die and borders changed by force. We were wrong. A revanchist Russia, led by President Putin, is trying to redraw borders, roll back history, and change Europe’s security reality. This is not a new Cold War, but a very hot one. It’s impossible to predict how or when this ends. But it seems likely that what’s broken cannot be fixed in the sense that there is virtually no likelihood of returning to the status quo ante.
In that spirit, the Tällberg Foundation recently hosted a conversation about the conflict in Ukraine and its implications—likely to be the first of many. This conversation featured Jan Eliasson, former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Pierre Lellouche, former French parliamentarian and minister, and Dalia Bankauskaitė, a strategic communications expert at Vilnius University in Lithuania, and was moderated by Alan Stoga, Tällberg’s chairman.
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