Power and Nations: Anne-Marie Slaughter

in our world is the area of international affairs. Power gets expressed by governments, it gets expressed by militaries, It gets expressed by international organizations like the United Nations and the alphabet soup of other organizations that go with it. All of these forms of power are also exercised by

real human beings. Over the next few weeks here on the show, we're going to be diving deep into the question of power in foreign affairs, and particularly the way that international power is changing in the current moment of historical time. In order to do that, we're going to engage some of the world's leading thinkers on power in

international affairs. The first guest joining us in this series of conversations is the extraordinary foreign policy thinker and expert and Maurice laughter Ann Ree's accomplishments are so extraordinary there are almost too many to list. She started her career as an international lawyer and as a professor at Harvard Law School. She went on to become the dean of

Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs. She worked in Hillary Clinton's State Department as the director of Policy Planning, traditionally the job for a policy intellectual who has the picture in mind, and today she's CEO of New America, the public policy think tank with which I have been fortunate enough to be associated at various times throughout my

own career. In short, Anne Marie is one of the most listened to and respected experts who thinks about the way power is deployed in our world, and especially about the people who deploy that power through networks. Anne Marie, thank you so much for joining me. An Marie, I'm

so grateful to you for coming on the show. I really wanted to talk to you about the big theme that we're focused on this season on deep background, which is the theme of power, because you've written so deeply about power and also participated in the shaping and distribution of power in the sphere of foreign affairs and international

relations over your fascinating career. So I thought maybe one way to structure the conversation was to begin by asking you how things have changed over the course of your time. So let's start with you when you first found yourself as an active participant in power, maybe when you helped Abe Shas to help Nicaragua to sue the United States in front of the International Court of Justice. How did you think about international power and the United States then

compared to how it's changed since. Such a great question, and that in many ways, the changes in the distribution of power, but also the way power is wielded has defined my career in international relations, or over my lifetime, we've seen dramatic shifts. I worked with Abe representing Nicaragua in the eighties, so we're still in the Cold War,

and that is the place to start. When you were studying international relations in the seventies and eighties, anytime after the Soviet Union really rose, you are looking at a bipolar world and everything is seen through that lens, even the case that Nicaragua brings against the United States and the World Court, because the United States had mined the waters of the Port of Nicaragua, which is actually kind

of astounding because we were opposed to the Sandinistas. Why are we opposed to the Sandinistas because they're supported by the Russians or the Soviets at that point, So everything is seen through this lens of you have two massive superpowers who are opposed and they support proxy wars of all kinds. But I'd say that's the Cold War distribution

of power. Two superpowers, obviously other nuclear powers France, Britain, China, who are very important, and then a structure of global governance that worked when the superpowers weren't trying to block one another. Today the first thing you'd say, as well, but there aren't two superpowers. And I do not believe that China and the United States are the superpowers of the twenty first century. I think that's far too simple. There are the traditional great powers, and Russia is still

a great power its ability to disrupt anyway. But then of course you have the rising powers or the returning powers India clearly, Brazil, South Africa, but also digital powers. It's just a much more complex landscape of power. The other thing I would start with is look at the largest companies in the world. They are far more powerful than a hundred of the states and the United Nations,

and then lots of civic groups. So you have a complex, shifting landscape of power that is layered on top of a traditional state system of power, and that itself has changed. We'll go more deeply into each of those types of power before we do. I actually want to ask something about how people who wield power in foreign affairs, individual

human beings operated in that bipolar Cold War era. Because Abehas at the time that you were working with him, was a professor at Harvard Law School, and there you were at the cusp of what will be a career where you two would work for the US government. Was there something strange at that time or was it perceived as strange or was it perceived as completely normal for you and he to help represent a country that wasn't on the US side in the Cold War? Yes, The

New York Times ran a story called America's Accuser. Abe's argument, which I still use today, is there is nothing wrong withholding the United States to its own highest standards, that this was appalling the behavior of the United States. So it was again this ideal of the rule of law, of the global rule of law, as well as the

domestic rule of law. And for somebody like Abe who believed in international law, he also believed in the intersection of law and politics, this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do and really a patriotic thing to do. Today people would say, well, you're helping an enemy of the

United States engaged in what we today call lawfair. Yes, right, which is there are a lot of definitions of law fair, but people often define it as the use of law and legal institutions to push the geopolitical interests of a party in a conflict. That wasn't really though, seen as the salient issue. It was more like, there's an ideal of international law in the United States, arrantly broke it, and so therefore it was patriotic to stand up for

that principle. One of the family as takeaways of that case was that you guys won, yes, right, Nicaraguo won its lawsuit in the World Court, and the US took its ball and went home, yes, and just refused to allow that judgment to mean much of anything in practice.

Talk to me just for a moment about whether that marked an important inflection point for you in the history of how international institutions like the World Court participated in global power, because I guess that was just a huge blow to the prestige of the Court in a certain way. It was so I'm thinking back, So we have this whole fight about jurisdiction. The Court rules that it has jurisdiction, and then the United States stops playing. But the Court

does issue a judgment against the United States. And so what Abe would have said, and what I would agree is international law is not going to work just like domestic law. It's not going to get enforced because the Court has no coercive powers. But when the government changed in the United States under the Clinton administration, there was a recognition that this was a black mark against the

United States. When we're there, we are telling to other countries that they ought to abide by the rule of law, and they could just point to this and say, you're a complete hypocrite. And so it became a bargaining chip between the US government and the Nicaraguan government, and there was finally a settlement. And Abe would have said, that's the intersection of law and politics. I still think his book The Cuban Missile Crisis is one of the great

works on international law and politics. And it's a monograph. It's one hundred and twenty five pages. I read it when I was an undergraduate in Richard Fox law class at Princeton, and it was all about out the ways in which you can use law to shape political choices and options. So I think he would have said overall that it was worth bringing the case. It was worth certainly litigating the case, and the Nicaraguan's got something out

of it. I'm really interested in something you've written deeply and extensively about one or even two full books about this, depending on how you measure, which is the human networks of interaction between the real people who participate in the shaping of decisions in international affairs. You know, that's the way the real world works, and a lot of people

don't know about it. And one of the things you've done in your work is to remind people out in the public that this is actually how international institutions often function. I want to ask you to start by just saying a word about how you think those networks of humans are shaping power now, and then I'll ask a follow on skeptical question about whether that's a good or a bad thing. But let's start with the how, because I think this is still not well understood by the general world.

When people think whereas power international domain, they either think, well, they are governments and they're these big strong things, or their corporations and they are these big strong things. You've done a lot, at least in my reading, to draw people's attention to the fact that there are humans who do this, and they have friendships and networks and experiences

and political responsibilities, and that plays a role. Yes, well, the first thing to say is, in my generation of international lawyers, people used to talk very openly about saying from Oscar Shackter, a former a great international law professor at Columbia, who talked about the invisible college of international law, and what he meant was international lawyers around the world who absolutely came together in places like the International Court

of Justice, but also in countless arbitrations. Right, there's an entire world of international arbitration of states versus states, but off in corporations versus states, and everybody knew each other, and everybody had either taught one another or worked with one another or been classmates, and so this and he would say the invisible college of international law. Right today to say that would be automatically suspect, and I think

rightly because it was a very closed shop. It was a white mail shop, but it wasn't just white men. It was of a very particular kind. And they went to long dinners in Geneva and the Hague in New York and various places, and all knew each other and did believe in the law. So I'm not saying that they bribed one another or anything like that, but it was a cozy world. It was a world of referrals. So once you're in it, you know, you recommend other

people as arbitrators or of counsel. It's a lucrative world. I think people would look at maybe the International Court of Justice or the International Bar or the United Nations and see that it's a pretty clubby group of diplomats and understand that there are corridors of power there and deals made that No one has any understanding of what I wrote about in my first book in two thousand and four, but I really started studying this in nineteen

ninety four. Were networks of judges, not international judges, but US judges, Canadian judges, South African, European judges who were talking to one another and meeting at international conferences and exchanging opinions. And then these networks, very powerful networks of central bankers, of finance ministers, securities commissioners, insurance commissioners. They have the same language, they face the same issues, and

they have a very strong professional set of biases. And if we are going to have an open international order, you have to be aware of who those folks are. You have to be able to lobby them, you have to be able to restrain them. I think there's there's good power there, but only if it is held to account and made more transparent. Arguably that that network has

those networks that you mentioned have now interpenetrated with each other. Yes, And sometimes as a shorthand, people will just say the one word Davos to describe the World Economic Forum that meets in Davos and elsewhere, and it's really hard to get invited, And it's all the room where it happened, Yes, And it's a lot of rooms, and you know, people

with power go and are excited to go. And you know, maybe there's something that critics of this, both from the left and the right, are onto when they say, gee, a lot of global geopolitics is being done by a small number of powerful people behind closed doors. And some people have a conspiracy theory about that, and I always say, look, you don't need a conspiracy theory about it. You know it actually happens. It is real. It is you know, you have to be objective about what power it does

and doesn't deploy. It's not absolute, but it's it's going on there. So I wonder if you would reflect on whether that's okay at all in their first place. I mean, could we make it better if we made the sessions more transparent at Davos, No, because people would still talk in the hallways or over exactly, and so it's not

so anyway, I want to hear your thoughts about that. Yeah, that that is very right, And yeah, I will just say I stopped going years ago, and it's it's it's awful because it is all the room where it happens, and it's all concentric circles radiating out from the central hotels.

But it's also a version of high school, right, It's it's like high school crossed with Hamilton, where you know, everybody wants to be in the room where it happens, and everybody is sure, there's there's a party going on somewhere, and there is, you know that much like high school. So as you were talking, I was thinking, yes, how

is that? Back in two thousand and four, I could have written a book called a New World Order where I really thought that these networks of government officials, again of financial officials, but also any trust officials, environmental officials, judges were really positive because I look at what you're describing now and think, no, there is no way to

hold that accountable. It's like the global blab You're not There's so much power there that there is no way to hold it accountable, to make it transparent, to lobby it. None of that will work. You actually have to change the power structures. But back you know, from nineteen ninety four to two thousand and four, it shows you where the American internationalist mindset was. I'm not going to talk about the world. This is the American international mindset, which

was the Coal Wars. Finally, over the global governance infrastructure we and our allies put in place after nineteen forty five can actually work. You created the International Criminal Court, You're bringing people to account. And I was writing saying, you know, instead of just focusing on these big global institutions, Let's look at these networks because they can get things

done and we need things done. Like if you have all global environmental ministers and they're all meeting and they all adopt a missions controls, we could get something done. And that was still a very optimistic vision of global governance. Since then, a again, as you pointed out, the CEOs are more powerful than many many, many of the government leaders. And you've also got even civic groups, which I admire.

But you know, the big eight civic groups they're in those rooms too, and you will listeners what you mean by that. Yes, sorry, the big eight non governmental organizations OXFAM, Mercy, Core Care, Doctors Without Borders, who are great organizations, but they have a lot of power because they're very big, they're global, and in a way they kind of represent global civil society in a lot of these rooms of power.

And whereas there are many smaller non governmental organizations, civic organizations of all kinds, who also feel that they don't have power. Many of them are in the global South.

They are upset about the global North. But the larger picture, I think for many people is just as you said that there's this deeply networked global elite of people have been in government, people who are in business, people who are at the heads of top universities and top civic organizations, the Davos crowd, and I would be counted as one. I was going to say, I's gonna say I'm not Jack policy planning. The State Department was in the Woodrow

Wilson at Princeton. Absolutely. That's one of the reasons you were so insightful about this, I think is that you were telling the story from the inside. So what changed? I mean, one one crude way to say it would be two thousand and four immediate post Cold War US has a very dominant global position, mostly because the Soviets

have just crumbled. Yes, and so you know, American foreign policy thinkers like you are trying to figure out what will work right and one possibility is maybe these networks would be a way for US to express power without pushing people around. You know, they would that that's that's maybe what a foreign policy realist, the cynic would say about why that looked good? Then what what what turned what? You could also see it optimistically, right, I mean, people

were well meaning. The Soviet Union was gone. We were hoping to really make change in that period of time. That's when the International Criminal Court was coming into existence. Horrible things happened in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, but we created the International Tribunals for Yugoslavia Criminal Tribunalist Yugoslavia and for Rwanda in order to respond to those been better if they hadn't happened to in the first place, but once they happen, at least people were going to be held

to account. What's happened over the last now nearly twenty years. That has made it so clear to you, and I think to many observers, at least those who are outside of the blob, that the blob isn't working. And I mean here, I would just say Donald Trump is just a symptom, yes, of a lot of people's feeling that it's not working, rather than any kind of a cause of it. Yes. And I would add that during that same period ninety four to two thousand and four, the

European Union is becoming a union. Right. So when I look at NET, I was looking at networked government structures. That is the European Union. It is networks of all their officials and it develops a single market, it develops a common currency, it comes together as a political union. So it was a much more optimistic period for the ability to have both law and government capacity at the

global level. And I saw these networks, if they could be more participatory, inclusive and transparent as a big piece of it. So what has changed, Well, the starting point, I think you would say is that hasn't delivered. Right as I sit now, I just have to start from the prospect of however imperfect the UN system was, and it always was. But before the end of the Cod War and after you still you had a Asian financial crisis in nineteen ninety seven and the finance ministers came

together and stabilized it. And climate change, we had the Kyoto Protocol. There was still global problem solving capacity. Today you're looking at a climate that is out of control. There we have the Paris Agreement, but nobody thinks that that is going to get us there. We have a global pandemic. The who was relatively powerless. You had to put together private again and public networks, and even that

didn't work nearly as well. You have global corruption. Tax haven's if you are not just even a member of the elite looking around much less somebody who's been on the losing end of the global economy. You just sense that these institutions are talking shops at best, and these deals that are being cut are benefiting the privileged at the expense of everyone else. So I think there's not

optimism about what the international system is doing. I do also think the Internet is a huge part of this, because we now actually have a tangible sense when we think about the Worldwide Web of just the extraordinary complexity of it all, and with all these different groups coming together, and of course they can come together virtually and then come together in the dark web, and we have a much better sense of all the crime that is a

part of all those networks. So you know, my book in twenty seventeen is about how do we use networks to fight criminal networks, how do we use networks to undo the power of other networks, or simply how do we see a map and try to control networks. So it's a far more complex world and a much less optimistic one. We'll be right back and what would work? What should we be trying to have in place of

the blog? I mean, so, take the climate change issue, which is so pressing that you mentioned we had international agreements. We still have some international agreements. They don't look like they're enough. That said, climate change remains a global problem, and presumably any solution still is going to require coordinated global action. So what's going to work? Such a simple question. What's going to work? Well, I would just start for a reason, we don't don't. We don't bother with the

chit chat. We just dive right in. So I would start by saying, any fantasy of world government, or even proto world government, cannot work because it's just far too complex. So if you look at the UN system, that's a proto world government with a hard power core, right, I mean, there's the Security Council is a realist core with an institutionalist rapping. Because Roosevelt and Stalin and Churchill knew full well that if the great powers were not on board,

you weren't going to get anything done. But they thought that there were enough situations where the great powers would either be on board or would not block one another, that it could work. And I think I think, all things considered, the world's been better off with the United Nations and without one. But today even if you could

convene some kind of global conference. It would be crazy to try to set something up that look like a global executive, a global legislature, so the Security Council, the General Assembly, and an international court. No, not that those things don't have someplace, But I think of the world in network terms. I think of it in the chessboard, the world of states and then the web, the world of all these networks, and they're superimposed on top of

each other. And when you're thinking about how are you going to solve global problems with both of those, with the state world and this world of network corporations and government officials and everybody else and criminals, then I think you need to assume there is no one solution. They're not even probably even five solutions. But well, let's take climate chases as an example. You do need a global agreement.

The Paris Agreement is quite important because it does set it's sort of distill scientific consensus and says this is what we're aiming for. You need focal points, and that's a focal point. The states at least are talking to each other and they keep coming back together. And so

you have a diplomatic forum, which is useful politically. I think the most important part of that is the allowance for non party stakeholders, which just means everybody's not a state, but who has a huge stake in combating climate change. So all the mayors, all the governors. Right, if I'm thinking about how I want to fight climate change, governors of states and mayors of cities who actually have the ability to reduce carbon emissions are an enormous piece of

the puzzle. More so, not more so, but certainly in addition to national governments, and you want to talk to them directly. The corporate power is vast, right last week the activists got to climate activists onto the board of Xon of Xon Mobile. If you can change the behavior of fossil fuel companies but also many others to get them to pledge to zero emissions, then you have many,

many more levers. But you also then need to empower the people who are suffering the most from climate change politically, and you need to think about how do you empower those voices so that you get the political will Domestically all of that is really messy. I think you can That's why I wrote a book about network theory. You can map it and then you can say, who is connected to whom? And these are bad connections. And then you can say, and who is not connected to whom?

Who needs to be and how do we do that efficiently? It can be done, but you need a very different way of thinking about global structures. And to your point, the power that gets wielded is not people sitting in foreign ministers sitting in a you know, paneled room in Davos making deals. It is power with power of movements, power, you know, digital power. It's it's all sorts of really messy kinds of power that you have to think about mobilize. Let me ask you about that because I have a

worry about the good side here. I mean the good side is, as you say, activists, climate activists on the exon board amazing, you know, bring people into the network who are from underprivileged backgrounds or from vulnerable communities, whether globally or locally excellent. We already saw this past year that the fact that there were just a small number, but they existed of African Americans who were CEOs of fortune.

Five hundred companies affected at least to some degree, corporate behavior around the Georgia voter suppression laws as I think of it. Oh yeah, that all that said, that's all the good side. I have this worry that what we're really talking about is just slightly changing the conversation by virtue of slightly changing who's in the room, when the same powerful elites still make the decisions. So Xon, you know,

two activists is great. They might affect the conversation. They don't control the board of directors, and they never will because as a numerical matter, we collectively have set up corporate governance so that the shareholders who sits on the board are those who own the shares, and that's the big institutional shareholders, and they're not likely to choose activists who would put the businesses into a position of making less money. So I guess what I'm trying to say

is this. I take one of the deep lessons of your body of work to be we need to expand these networks because the networks are so powerful, and that makes it very valuable to expand the networks. But I also hear you saying at the same time, you know it's not enough just to expand the networks. We would need to change the structure of power behind the networks, And here sorry for being a bit long winded about this, but here it seems to me that the real power

behind them is global capital. That unlike the Cold War, where the real power where the governments, the Eastern Block or Western Bloc, today it really is the big corporations that just brings so much money to bear, so much influence to bear on the governments that they will push the decision making in a way that serves their interests, which, to be fair, means the interests of their shareholders. Am I sounding too much like you know the young marks there?

Or do you think there's do you think there is something to it? So first I think again you are correct. I'm trying to be realistic enough to say, look, there's never going to be a world where there isn't an elite and a power structure, or at least we've never seen that in no society. So this so to some extent you've just got to accept that. You can say, ours, at least in the United States is deeply corrupt. I mean, it's so closed and the political system does not allow

you to change it. But I think what I would say in terms of so what do you do with these networks. I'd say two things. One, it's as important to disconnect connections that are dangerous or bad as it is to connect folks who you need to bring in.

So it really is when I talk about strategies of connection as opposed to strategy of conflict, I'm saying, you've got to map this and you've got to see to use my example of if you really changed the lobbying laws, but more importantly, the campaign finance laws, because that's what gets lobbyist power, then you're disrupting the connection between corporate America and Congress in a way that is going to make it easier for people to get to elect people

who will represent their interests and not corporate interests. And you can do that in many ways. And indeed, a aggressive politics should be about restraining corporate power, not just by any trust or other ways, but by really recognizing where are those pernicious connections. And again it's not just transparency. I think you have to rupture them. So partly I think you can really restrain corporate power that way. I think,

on the other hand, a global tax regime. I was just reading a new book that's coming out by alec Ross about global taxation one global taxation. Those then you need to connect up all these tax regimes that right now tax lawyers and accountants can manipulate. So again I think if you can't, you cannot undo the networked world. I mean, it's just it's always been true and now it can be global. So you have to come up

with strategies of connection and disconnection. And again, the other thing I would say, in terms of shifting the power balance, imagine if you have what I call an impact hub for every sustainable development goal. Sustainable development goals are sort of the bible of good things that we would love to see happen, and but each one has an impact hub that has yes, international organizations represented, but also civic groups of all kinds, investments, lots of impact capital, and

metrics of how are you advancing toward this goal? So you can create a You've got networks, but hubs are where you can actually have people come together, where you can also make it much more transparent. But equally importantly, you can then have metrics of progress that advocacy can mobilize around, politics can mobilize around, and people can be called to account. I don't think it's perfect, but I think if you look at the Global Alliance for Vaccines

and Immunization, they've done that. Yeah, let's just say a word more. This is a nice place for us to wind up about what an impact hub literally is. It's an abstract concept. It's an abstract You have a network which is lots of different people with lots of different interests. I guess they are getting together in the impact What is the impact? No? So well, all right, so right now you'd say, well, the United Nations is the as I held of the system of global governance. Right, everybody

comes together in New York. I'll take this example of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. So we have a World Health Organization and that's a hub for global health. But the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization and a group of pharmaceutical companies and a lot of civic organizations came together twenty years ago and said, you know, we're going to create an alliance. Very interesting. Alliances used

to be only states. This is a global alliance of politics, people, corporate people, civic people, scientists, universities, and our goals going to be to immunize the world's children. And so the hub is simply the secretariat. It's much smaller and looser than something like the United Nations, but there is something. There's a website there, there is a you know, a

governance structure, and they commit. Then they they have networks set up in many different countries, but with a very clear goal of immunizing children, and they connect all these different actors for measurable impact. So I call that an impact hub, and I can imagine doing that around water security and climate change is too big, you'd have to break it up into different different things. But lots of environmental goals, lots of social goals. Health is probably easier

because it's very measurable. But you know, so if you say global peace, not so much. If you talked about good jobs, right, and what would that take? You can again take this vitangled more ass of networks everywhere and start thinking about how do you rationalize them and how do you structure them four specific goals And if I look at the world, I think about developing those impact hubs in many different places, this would not just be

the North. In ways that would at least give you something to start with when you're thinking about actually getting these things done. It's fascinating. It also feels ever so slightly like coming full circle these alliances that produce the impact hubs. One way they differ from the old arrangements is that they're not really operating in the same way as tools of the big governments, tools of the states.

They are as you describe them, and Geo's corporations, the super mega rich, and so I guess I want to close by asking you whether you think, with some others, that states are sort of receding in this world, not that they're gone, but that they're less important to solving stuff than you might have thought of them as being twenty five or thirty years ago, because they're part of

the system that hasn't delivered for people. Or do you think they're just as strong and important as ever as some days I tend to think, and that these institutions are just alternative roots, as it were, for trying to get things done when the states don't have an interest. So I think states are less powerful than they were for sure. Look, the United Nations was designed for a world of sixty states, and it's got two hundred states

and it doesn't work right. The European Union, for all of its flaws works because it's got twenty seven states, And so part of this, when we talk about global governance, is too much, too much bureaucracy, sort of victims of its own success. I do think governments have less power, but I also think will never address our problems unless we strengthen governmental power in lots of ways, certainly around corporations. You're never going to get global taxes unless you have

governments who really come together and enforce it. I also think if you really look at at scale, governments have a scale that nothing else can reach. But government itself has to be reorganized. Right. You've got these huge hierarchies. They cannot operate in this world of connection and disconnection very well, but they are essential, and as broken as I think American democracy is, I'd still rather put my faith in the American government that any foundation or corporation.

What I would say, though, is coming back to power. Where do I see real hope in this idea of impact hubs. It's more the mayors and the governors. And when I think about mayors, that's something any American can think, Oh well, wait a minute, I could work in the mayor's office. If you want to represent the population of the United States. If you bring together the staffs of mayors across the country, it is far more representative than the Washington bureaucracy. So there is a way there of

redressing the power balance. You're still going to have elites, but it's not this, it's not the Davos elite, right, It is more people coming together around specific issues with lots again, think about mayors. I think you can redress the power balance by opening opening up these networks sort of sources of power that are more accessible to regular citizens than the kind of calcification of the global elite,

which is what I think we see now. I'm very happy that you're able to end with that modestly optimistic picture, and I just want to express gratitude for your brilliance, your analysis, your generosity with your time today, and really for the whole body of your work. We need people like you who are in the inside and then are also capable of explaining it to us and then critiquing it simultaneously. Thank you so much, well, thank you, what

a great conversation. One of the reasons I wanted to hear from Anne Marie was precisely that she's the leading theorist of how networks of powerful people interact in order to try to make change and to facilitate international organizations doing their job well. Anne Marie laid out very cogently and very honestly and self reflectively how her own perceptions of the power of those networks has changed over time.

She is just as committed as she ever was to the idea that powers should be deployed equally, that it should be deployed fairly, and that it should contribute to an order in international relations that is rational, logical, and that looks out for fundamental rights and freedoms. Yet she herself has come to be skeptical of the way that networks of elite international actors are perceived globally, and indeed she's even skeptical about whether those same networks can always

do everything that they set out to do successfully. In short, An Marie is describing a trajectory followed by many liberal internationalists, among whom I would count myself in the aftermath of the Cold War, great hope, optimism, and interest in the way that international global networks of thoughtful people making rational decisions could make the world a safer and a better place, and address long term serious problems, problems that today are

clearer than ever on issues like climate. Yet, over the intervening decades since the end of the Cold War, we've been mugged by reality, forced to see the ways in which liberal internationalism and the globalization that's come with it has left many people behind and disillusioned many many people on the left and the right with the way international

power is deployed under those circumstances. We need new imagining, We need new approaches, We need variety in how power it is deployed, and we need clarity in terms of the goals for which we are trying to deploy power. Anne Marie is at the forefront of those drawing our attention to the need for those things. It was and remains a privilege for me to learn from such a

vibrant foreign policy intellectual as Anne Marie. I hope and trust that you enjoy the conversation as much as I did, and I hope you're looking forward as much as I am to the next several conversations that we will continue to have with foreign policy thinkers about the grand issues of America in the world, the transformation of power, and what needs to be done in the years ahead, I'll admit to regular listeners that I still have unsettled on

the perfect substitute from my COVID sign off telling you all to be careful, be safe, and be well. But for the moment, as more and more of us are vaccinated and we come closer and closer to being able to begin to imagine a safer world, at least here in the United States, let me say for now, think deep thoughts, be well, and have a little fun. Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Tolliday, and our

showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia, Jean Coott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column from Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com.

Slash Feldman to discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background