Larry Jacobs: Hello. Come join us. Sorry, we're starting a little late. We had some Zoom difficulties. But Tom Friedman is with us, and we're all set to get going. Come on in. We'll take a few minutes to let you all come in, and we'll hop in. Let me just take a moment to get us going here. I'm Larry Jacobs. I'm a professor at the University of Minnesota in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, which is the University of Minnesota School of Public Affairs. We'll let you know at the bottom of your screen, you'll see a Q&A button, and this is so you can give us questions, which we will respond to as much as possible. It is a great pleasure to have my friend Tom Friedman with us. Tom is the most nationally and internationally visible Minnesotan. Thank you, Tom, for coming. Tom was born in Minneapolis. He was raised in a suburb just outside Minneapolis called St. Louis Park, which has produced so many outstanding Americans. Tom went to the University of Minnesota for a few years and then transferred to Brandeis University. As many of you know, Tom writes a weekly column, the New York Times, and he's written seven books, including some Blockbuster best sellers, including From Beirut to Jerusalem, published in 1989, which won the National Book Award. He wrote The World is Flat, which was a global best seller, including in China, where it was published though without some of the criticisms of China. Most recently, he published Thank You for Being Late, which is a terrific book about where we are in America and includes a nice section on Minnesota. Tom has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He's also been awarded the Order of the British Empire from the Queen, which is an extraordinary recognition. He has lived, reported from the Middle East. He's familiar with leaders on most of the continents, and he is a true pleasure to talk to. Tom Friedman, thank you so much for joining us today. Tom Friedman: Larry, great to be with you. Thanks for inviting me. It's great. Larry Jacobs: Your columns of late have been a bit more pessimistic than the Tom Friedman columns that have a theme of hopefulness and optimism, even as you surveyed the world. I'm curious, do you think America's on the downslide? Tom Friedman: I think that we're seeing things, Larry, that I've never seen before. Excuse me, I have seen them before, covering the Lebanese Civil War. I think that's one of the reasons maybe that you sense the alarm in my column because every journalist has their baptismal experience, their founding journalistic encounter. Mine was actually going essentially from Minnesota via London and Oxford to Beirut and covering years four through nine of the Lebanese Civil War. I actually saw a country fall apart. I actually saw what happens when people go all the way. I saw what happens when people think that there's so much ruin in this country. We can just hack away at it for our own narrow interests as much as we want. I saw what happens when major political actors don't stop at red lights. One of the most searing experiences I ever saw in my time in Beirut, and I don't remember the exact contexts or which of the many battles Shiite, Sunni, Christian, Muslim. But it broke out very suddenly, and I saw a car going down the street backwards at 50 miles an hour. It's my image in my head of just total breakdown. I never forgot it. Maybe, I had never heard a gunshot growing up in Minnesota, so until I came to Beirut. I'm aware that what happens when people go all the way. When they violate not only the written rules of the game but the norms of the game. I see that happening here. I see that happening here, and I see it happening with impunity. I believe that it's not only Joe Biden and Donald Trump that are on the ballot in this election; there something deep and fundamental about America is on the ballot. I believe that we are going to have a contested election unless Joe Biden managed to win by a landslide, which I think is still I hope that's what I'm supporting, but I still not going to count on it. Trump is telling us in every way he can. That there are two things and two things only that will happen on November 4th. Either he will be declared the winner, or he will contest the election and attempt to delegitimize all of the male imbalance, which he is assuming and is predicted to come in roughly two to one for Biden. Once that happens, we're off to the races. Then anything could happen. People taking sides, Trump and Trump media delegitimizing the outcome. I can get really dark. I can ruin any dinner party. I do weddings and Bar Mitzvahs also. But I can imagine some really dark scenarios on November 4th. Larry Jacobs: This is the side of Tom Friedman that hasn't been publicly visible. You've written a number of columns over the last couple of months that have gone into detail. You've talked about the politics of humiliation, the decline in social trust. After the bombing in Beirut in early August, you went back to your experience there. You begin your column by saying that in Lebanon, everything is now politics, and you go on to then make a comparison between United States and Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries, saying that our political differences are so deep that our two parties now resemble religious sex and we can see this where you've got a Republican Party that describes our energy, meaning oil and gas and coal, along with opposition to abortion and opposition to face mask, and the Democratic Party adopting the opposite side as if it was a zero sum game. Are we really that far down the road of decay and civil war? Tom Friedman: I often get in trouble, Larry, when I talk about US and China and any comparisons between US and China, but what the hell? Let's get in trouble. There's only one thing worse in my view than one party autocracy, which China has. That's one party democracy. One-party democracy is when you have a party in power, and the other party is completely dedicated to obstructing and undermining the decision making and policies of that party in power. When you have one party autocracy like China, and you have a leadership that however autocratic is at least trained in engineering and science and believes in Newtonian physics, it can order in many ways, from the top down, new infrastructure, new education, etc. Even as it's crushing the hopes and dreams of Uighurs and other Chinese aspiring to a more open society. But it can order a lot of things that can advance that society from the top down. When you have a one party democracy where basically one party's ruling and the other party is obstructing in a system that is constitutionally designed actually to divide power, but assumes that the parties will compromise in the end to come together on big decisions and do big hard things together, when you have that, you're really stymied. You're just spinning your wheels. We're just spinning our wheels. There isn't a bridge out there that would be named after Trump. We haven't built an ounce of infrastructure, we're trying to destroy the little national healthcare we have, not we, the Republican Party under Trump. I'm really worried. How long can we go on with a system of government that is built around the notion of divided power so no one can emerge as a king? Then unable to produce the compromises that were also embedded in the logic of that system. We just keep drifting year after year. I'm very worried, and I think the reason we have done so poorly in this pandemic, and that is one of the reasons. The other main one is that progress really depends in a democracy on truth and trust, that we all share the same basic truth and we share enough trust that even if we disagree, we can come together for a solution. We have an administration that has been destroying our truth and trust almost as a policy. Trump's whole approach to politics is to divide us. He describes as fake news anything that he doesn't like or is critical of him. We have social networks now, particularly Facebook and Twitter, whose business model is to arouse you by putting in front of you the most either appealing or enraging material, true or false, to keep you on the site so they can sell you more ads. The two of them together, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump are doing a dandy job of undermining truth and trust and destroying our cognitive immunity, our ability to sort out fact from fiction and our social immunity, our ability to come together to do big hard things. Larry Jacobs: Let me ask you about the spot we're in, in terms of partisanship. You a decade ago were an advocate for what you called radical centrism. You had written and supported the policies of Republican presidents, including President Bush's decision to go into Iraq. You had followed around, spent quite a bit of time with James Baker in the previous Republican administration. Now you've come out and you've supported Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. I guess my question is, is this part of where we are as a country? Does it begin to erode your ability to build that common good and to build the credibility to talk outside of this everything is politics world we're in today? Tom Friedman: Well, there's a lot of things in there. Let's unpack it a little bit. Everything is politics point came from an Israeli religious philosopher, Moshe Halbertal, who simply was making the point that politics has to be about something other than itself. To have meaning and be productive. If everything is politics, then it's really hard to function in advance as a society. If face masks are politics, if the laws of gravity are politics, if every job appointment is politics, if ramming through appointing a new Supreme Court justice is simply driven by politics, the timing of it, then once everything becomes politics, then you're through the looking glass. Politics has to be about something other than itself. That's one problem we have. The other is that if you ask me what my hope is, if I can't travel right now, Larry, but if I could travel anywhere, I would love to travel to South Carolina. I'd love to sit down with African American men and women there. Maybe go to a church up to the choir on a Sunday morning. Ask them one question. You guys really lifted Joe Biden up off the mat. Joe Biden's candidacy. He was down for the count before Jim Clyburn and the voters of South Carolina lifted him up. The referee was counting Joe Biden out, 1, 2, 3. Then South Carolina reached up and stilled his hand. It was really the Black vote there. I'd love to just sit around and ask, why did you do that? It wasn't because you wanted him to appoint Kamala Harris as vice president because you could have voted for her. Even though she was by then, out of the race, but if you wanted a Black candidate, you could have voted for Cory Booker. I think it's because there was some real wisdom there that they intuited that our country's getting ripped apart. What it needed was someone who could actually begin to repair it from the start, someone who actually could work with Republicans and pull it back together. My fervent hope is that I hope Biden wins in a landslide. I hope this version of the Republican Party is crushed because it deserves to be crushed and that it fractures between the Trump cult and moderate Republicans of whom there are many, still, I believe, and you get a whole new center being forged. That's why I've done a couple of columns urging Biden to basically form a national unity government and appoint two or three Republicans to his cabinet and really try to rebuild the center. Because we only have big hard things left to do, Larry, and big hard things can only be done together. If we just have four more years of this, I really worry. But what the Republican coalition has become is a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a network without integrity. I'm sorry, that's what it is. It has nothing to do with the Republican leadership. I admired the people I covered, Jim Baker, George Schultz, George HW Bush. It has nothing to do with them. This is a deeply aberrant political phenomenon. I believe for the health of both conservative ideology and this, I'm not alone, if you read Michael Gerson or Peter Wehner or George Will, for the health of conservative ideology. I have some conservative twitches myself. This Trump cult version of Republicans really has to be destroyed. Larry Jacobs: We had Peter Wehner out several times over the past year or two. Your colleague at the times, Ross Duffer, takes a slightly different take on the threat of Donald Trump. He says the president is a noisy weakling, not a budding autocrat. He says he's going to leave power like a normal president. If he tries to resist, it'll be a farce. He goes through limitations that Trump has as an autocrat compared to real autocrats, including the lack of popularity, his lack of power over the media, the lack of support from his own military, and on and on. Do you worry that sometimes our fears about democracy's demise may actually reinforce the fragility of our democracy? Tom Friedman: No, I disagree with Ross on that. I think one of the most dangerous things ever written about Trump was the person who wrote when he was elected, who scolded the press when he was elected, saying, oh, you silly reporters and editors, you took Trump literally when his supporters only took him figuratively. Well, literally, we saw Donald Trump call the president of Ukraine and use American military aid as a lever to try to force him to disclose information that would smear his rival in the next election. Literally, we've watched Bill Barr at Trump's behest turn the Justice Department into a law firm for the Trump family company. We've literally seen this guy speak 20,000-plus falsehoods and misleading statements. By the way, speaking in the military, we literally saw him suborn, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense to accompany him on a walk outside the White House to a church across the street after the street was forcibly cleared of peaceful demonstrators who are there legally, so he could stand and pose with a Bible upside down. If I'm wrong, Larry, then people will just say, Tom, you exaggerated. I'll just say, wow, I really was worried and I'm really sorry about that. But I'd rather ring the alarm bell and later say, I rang it too loud than not ring it at all. Larry Jacobs: Another topic you've been writing for many years about the implications of what you call the flat world. The world is flat. America's economic prosperity or global influence are clearly tied to the knowledge economy. That's grown up. I'm curious if your views about whether we can sustain the public investments in education or de-spending for different aspects of this knowledge economy that put America as the world leader in a whole set of industries. Can that continue? Can that flourish in a world that's so polarized in which you've got so many people who are not part of that dynamic sector? Tom Friedman: Well, if it can then we're in trouble because it's the engine of economic growth, and it's just your question, Larry. Seems like I have to dust off the cobwebs in my head just to get to it. That was what we used to talk about before. You know what I mean? Three years ago, before the madness. People who don't think about the future tend not to do well there, and we've had no conversation at all in this country for the last four years about what world are we living in. What are the big trends in this world? How do we best align ourselves with those trends? How do we then give more Americans the tools they need to thrive in that world? We're just, in that sense, falling behind. Fortunately, we have a dynamic society that can go on without a lot of government direction, but we'd sure be getting a lot more out of it if we had a government that was thinking about, what are the enabling tools at the federal level we can do, whether it's H1B visas, whether it's a national compact on immigration, whether it's infrastructure spending. We haven't had that conversation at all. China has. China's just sitting there having that conversation every day and doing it in an autocratic way, not in a way I want, but they are doing it. I think, eventually, that catches up to you. I think China is the worst ruling system in the world. I think America is the best, but I think China is getting 90% out of a bad system, and we're getting 10% out of a good system. That's really what's worrying me. I just say I'm working on another book right now and I don't know when it'll be done, whatever, but it's really about the world we're in right now, which I describe as fast, fused and deep, really defined by this acceleration and the pace of technological change, fused, defined by this way telecommunications is fusing us together as well as climate change. Then deep the way technology is really going deep into things so much so that without anyone ordering it, a global lexicographer, we all suddenly started using the adjective deep. Deepfake, deep research, deep medicine, deep mind. We all suddenly reach for this word because we intuited technology was going to a depth could toggle my DNA, could fake your visage, in a way no one could ever imagine that it wasn't enough just to call it fake. We had to call it deepfake. It wasn't enough to call it medicine. We had to call it deep medicine. I'm a big believer in popular culture, Larry. You may remember that the song that won the Oscars a year ago was by Lady Gaga, and it was called Shallow. But the main verse is, I'm off the deep end, watch as I dive in. I'll never reach the ground, crash through the surface where they can't hurt us. We're far from the shallow now. Larry, baby, we are far from the shallow now. The world is getting fast-fused and deep all at the same time. Let me just finish this one point. Because of that, the only way you can actually govern this world is through ecosystems, through what I call complex adaptive coalitions. That's why these parties all over the world are struggling now because they grew out of the left-right binary grid. But we're in a world now where those binary left-right positions, they actually don't align with this world. Larry Jacobs: I think one of the concerns that some folks have is that the inequality that's been generated in America because so many people are not part of the knowledge economy because they're less well educated because of the jobs they have, that in some circumstances, that's been a driver of right-wing populism that elected Donald Trump, and that is part of the forces that are now resisting the investment in education, the investment in science, the investment in R&D, that is the lifeblood for this knowledge economy, this 21st-century direction that America has been pointing towards for now decades, but maybe losing its spot. Tom Friedman: Well, I think any monocausal explanation for Trump would be insufficient in my view. I've not been to a Trump rally, but I've watched them on TV, and it doesn't look like a lot of poor people to me. I sure know a lot of Trump voters in my life, and they aren't poor people. There may be Trump voters who are working class, who have not experienced that growth in income, but there are a lot of them that are wealthy. I think this is much more complicated by that. I think Trump is fed by a lot of different rivers. One is clearly a real pushback against the political correctness you see choking some college campuses today. They love it when Trump is naughty when he breaks all the rules of political correctness. He's driven by people who, yes, want to redivide the pie, but also they want to grow the pie. I think it's driven by people who fear we're becoming a minority-majority country. I think it's driven by people who think that if you want to immigrate to this country, you should have to ring the doorbell, not just walk in. I think that some things are true, even if Donald Trump believes them. I'm not saying all those are, but I'm just saying that he's touching on real things, but I think they're cross-cutting. I think turning this into a socioeconomic explanation alone would be not correct. I think there are a lot of Trump voters, too, who aren't actually paying any attention to Trump. They actually hate the people who hate Trump more than they care about Trump. They just actually hate what they see as liberal elites, and Trump is the stick they poke in their eye. That's why we in the media keep coming to these people with more information about Trump. Do you realize he only paid $750 in taxes? Do you realize he was having affair with a porn star? Do you realize that he tried to enlist a foreign government to undermine his rival, and we keep coming to them with more information, and they couldn't care less. Because they know who he is. But what's really motivating them is that they really despise the people who despise Trump, liberal elites who they think look down on them, and I think that's what a lot of this is about. It's a really complicated dynamic. Then there's just people who want their tax cut and just ready to ignore everything else, or people who want to take away the right to choose and ignore everything else. I think he's carrying a lot of different suitcases ideologically. Larry Jacobs: Let's go to the world, which is one of your beats. You have been, I think, studious in both calling out Donald Trump for policies and directions that you find abhorrent. You've also recognized areas where he's had foreign policy successes. You've talked about China in terms of his forceful challenge. More recently, you've been really quite positive about the Middle East deal between Israel and some moderate Arab states. I'm wondering, at one point in one of your terrific columns in mid-September, you described the Middle East deal as a soap opera Could you briefly explain that? Tom Friedman: [LAUGHTER] Well, there were so many cross-cutting currents that made that deal possible. Yes, I supported that deal, and for the next two weeks, Trump would go give speeches on it and say, Tom Friedman, for the New York Times, supported it. He would even quote me. I really believe you call balls in strikes. If I see something he does that I like, I support it. On China, I said that Donald Trump is not the American president America deserves, but he sure is the American president that China deserves, in terms of someone who's ready to push back. Where he does the right thing, I have no problem aligning with it. The Middle East deal, though, came about in such a crazy way. Let's just backtrack. Jared Kushner, who's doing all this on behalf of the president, spent two years thinking up a peace plan, and he finally comes up with it last January. I was actually in Israel when he came up with it. The plan basically calls for Israel to be able to annex 30% of the West Bank. Palestinians get 70% of the West Bank, but in all chopped up little Bantu stands loosely connected and capital on the outskirts of Jerusalem and then some land swaps as well. That was his vision of a two-state solution. That vision was actually almost dictated by Netanyahu himself and Ron Dermer, Netanyahu's ambassador in Washington. And Kushner made no bones about it. He was super pro-Israel, and the Palestinians rejected the whole thing and wouldn't actually negotiate with him. Kushner comes out with the plan, and it falls like a lead balloon. Palestinians want to engage with it at all. What happened, though, is that Trump's ambassador to Israel, a guy named David Friedman, no relation, as they say, who basically almost serves like the ambassador of the settlers to the United States rather than the US ambassador to Israel. Friedman goes to Netanyahu apparently and said, Palestinians have rejected the whole plan. You should just go annex your 30% right now. Netanyahu was gearing up to do that when Trump and Kushner, I mean, to their credit, said, you can't do that. We won't support that because obviously all the Arab states were against it, America's Arab allies. Netanyahu kept saying, we're going to do this on July 1st, and he kept having to push it back. The settlers are Netanyahu's base. They're a key part of his base. Because Netanyahu, meanwhile, is being charged and faced in trial, basically now on counts of bribery and corruption. He's trying to use the legal system to avoid debt. The last thing he can't afford to lose is a key pillar of his base, the settlers. He keeps trying to mollify the settlers and I'm going to get it, and next week we'll do and then [inaudible], there is nothing happens, basically. Meanwhile, the settlers say to BB as for the Palestinians getting 70%. Because what Kushner and Trump said to Netanyahu was, you can get your 30%, but only if you agree that the Palestinians get a state of their own, albeit as fragmented as the Kushner plan envisaged in the rest of the West Bank. The settlers would not agree to that. Netanyahu was stuck then into the picture came the UAE, basically, which had been looking in order to counterbalance Iran to open a more formal relationship with Israel. They had a deep informal one, and they basically made a proposition to Netanyahu, we'll get you out of the tree. We will open formal diplomatic and trade and tourist relations with Israel, provided you agree that we get F35 from Washington and that you will not go ahead with annexation. Netanyahu jumped at it because it was a way for him to get something for the settlers, not that they care so much about the UA, but feel like he got something while at the same time backing down from his plans to annex the 30%. It fell into Trump's lap, to be honest. It wasn't like he thought up this crazy Rube Goldberg connection between things. But from my point of view, anything makes the Middle East look and feel more like the European Union with countries trading and having good relations and tourism with each other. It's a good thing. I think it'll be more healthy for the region. I welcome that. But what I said about the plan was that the day they signed it, I said, this plan was important, both for what it accomplished, but for what it revealed. What it revealed was something very, important. It revealed, remember what I said, Netanyahu and his ambassador, they basically wrote the basic contours of the Kushner plan. Kushner's approach, Netanyahu for decades, has told American statesmen and women test me. Wink and nod. I'm telling you, you test me. You give me everything I need for my politics, and you will be amazed what I'll be ready to give up. Test me. What did Kushner do? He tested him. He basically gave Netanyahu the pen and said, You draw. What is it you need? You draw it, and Netanyahu did it. What the plan revealed was that Netanyahu could not accept Netanyahu's own plan. The settlers turned him down, and he would not override the settlers. Bibi would not accept Bibi's plan. This whole thing, as I wrote, didn't just advance relations between Israel and the Gulf States. It also revealed something huge, which is that the two-state solution is over, as long as Bibi Netanyahu is in power, for sure, if not more. Therefore, the Palestinian issue will recede from an international issue to a much more internal Israeli issue. Palestinians over time are sure to demand their civil rights and equality, and this will pose a deep moral and political challenge to Israel. Israel and Netanyahu could always deflect that challenge. It was always there. They could always deflect that challenge by saying, two state solution, the peace process is coming. The Secretary of State is coming. Hold off. Now, what US secretary of state is going to engage with Netanyahu when Netanyahu could not accept Netanyahu's on plan? Larry Jacobs: Yeah. That's incredible analysis. Tom Friedman: That's what actually happened, you know what I mean? Of course, Trump's out there. For him, it's just headlines and he doesn't care, the headlines are good. Anything that makes the region, as I say, more open and integrated, it's really good. Larry Jacobs: As you said, the test was going to come in time. [OVERLAPPING] Tom Friedman: Palestinian, it didn't go away. That didn't in fact, I think it actually sharpened that issue by really exposing where Netanyahu is. Larry Jacobs: Tom, I want to move you over to China. As you mentioned, you've praised the president for being tougher on China than any previous president. My question is, when I look at previous presidents, they haven't had this muscular talk. They haven't, suspended trade or threatened trade wars. But it looks to me like, they've been pretty active on the diplomatic front. They were basically created a noose the Obama years built on the Bush years in terms of this rebalancing of military and diplomatic power around China. Doesn't that count? I mean, it seems to me that if we praise Trump for being tough, we're devaluing, that alternative approach, which is about diplomacy and the presentation of military power in order to empower diplomatic solutions. Tom Friedman: Larry, it's a very good question. You'll notice in all my writings, I have never praised Trump in comparison to previous presidents. He was the right president for now. I thought Obama was the right president for then. Also, I've been very limited in my praise for Trump on China. It's very qualified. Let's unpack the whole thing. Because I'm writing I'm not just throwing the stuff out there. I'm really thinking very careful about every word that I'm saying and why. It has a logic. It's operating out of a loger framework. My view is that the last 40 years of US-China relations will go down as constitute an epoch, 1979 to 2019. It was an epoch of unconscious integration, unconscious in the sense that anyone in America over time could wake up and say, I want to have a supply chain from China. I want to start a company in China. The UFM could say, I want to have an exchange program with Chinese students. American companies could say I want to hire a Chinese student. Chinese companies could say, I want to be listed on the Nasdaq. I want to partner with American companies. The two countries really economically grew together rather tightly into what, tongue and cheek called one country two systems, we in China, not China and Hong Kong, we're the real one country excuse me, two systems. I would argue that the relative and underline that word three times, that the relative peace and prosperity that the world has enjoyed since 1979, as globalization has expanded, was really heavily built on and dependent on this US-China entent and collaboration. It brought more people in China out of poverty faster than any comparative period of history in the world. As I said, we collaborated on some big things like certain global trade rules and like the Paris Climate Agreement. I was totally supportive of President Obama's approach to that. What happened in the second half of Obama's term, and then in the first half of Trump's term, though, was a shift. It was on a couple of different axes. One shift. I've been visiting China for, since the late 1980s. I can tell you I sold a lot of books in China. I've done campus talks in China. I've done bookstore talks in China. China today is so much more open, Larry. Than it was 40 years ago, and it is so much more closed than it was seven years ago. In other words, there's been a real U-turn under Xi Jinping. Trump and Obama overlap that U-turn, okay? There's been a real hardening inside China in terms of freedoms of expression, be they previously very limited, but now even more so. The New York Times has been thrown out. The Washington Post has been thrown out. I don't know when or if I'll ever get another visa. There's been a real U-turn here. You have Xi Jinping naming himself president for life, and that story never ends well anywhere. I'm very concerned about where China is going there. Now, parallel to all of that, the very structure of US-China trade also changed. For, I would say, for the first 30 years, we sold China what I call deep goods. Deep goods are things like microchips, software, stuff that went deep inside their economy, their homes, their businesses, and economic systems. China sold us shallow goods, things we wore on our back, socks we wore on our ankle, shoes we wore on our feet, solar panels, we put on a roof. They sold us shallow goods. We sold them deep goods. What happened in the last decade, parallel to the Xi Jinping move, was that China was able to start making a lot of deep goods. That's what the whole Wow five G story is about. Suddenly China has the cheapest, you know, 5G telecom product in the world. When we sold them, deep goods, and they sold us shallow goods. We didn't care whether China was authoritarian, libertarian, or vegetarian. But when they wanted to sell us deep goods, suddenly, the mismatch in values, the fact that we don't have a shared framework to trust each other, to buy their deep goods, suddenly, that really mattered. The third thing that happened was a technological change, where everything became dual use. Again, when they were buying our soybeans and we were buying their toys just as an extreme caricature example, well, a Barbie doll is not dual use, That is civilian military application, but this baby is, okay, or elements of this baby. Three things stacked up, actually, four, and I'll give you the fourth. China does this U-turn politically. They're now able to sell us deep goods, and at the same time, they begin projecting their power as they're growing stronger in the South China Sea. Obama really responds to that. What was the fourth is I'll think of the fourth in a second. But the net result of it, this was the fourth, which is that, how did China get rich, Larry? How did it go from poverty to middle income? It went from poverty to middle income using a number of strategies. First, really hard work. Second, delayed gratification. Third, massive investments in education. Fourth, massive investments in infrastructure. Fifth, stealing other people's intellectual property, sixth forced technology transfer, seventh nonreciprocal trade arrangements, eighth, non compliance with WTO rulings. It's this combination of cheating and really hard work, very unusual. You don't see this in history very often. For 30 of those 40 years, American businesses were ready to wink and turn a blind eye to the cheating because they were making so much money anyways. This is a gross exaggeration, but it basically was the situation. American business was the ballast in the relationship. If American president wanted to do something hard, the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing came on and said, Wait. Let us handle this, because we're all making money here. That stopped also in the last six, seven years. The balance was removed from the relationship, and all of that happened between Obama and Trump. Obama reflected the front end of that by really shifting geopolitically, more military resources to Asia, and then Trump came along and basically called the game on trade and economics. That's what happened. That's why I'm not critical of Obama. This was all an evolving thing. Obama was there in the right way at the right time and Trump is here, I believe, at the right way at the right time, except this. This is where I've been enormously critical of him. Trump is really good at breaking things. If you want something broken, man, this is your guy. You want a Paris Climate Agreement broken, he's your guy. You want Obamacare broken, he's your guy. You want the Iran nuclear deal broken, he's your guy. This guy is really good at breaking things. Especially things that say made by Obama on them, okay? But he is actually really bad at building things, use to build something, you have to build a coalition and you've got to give the other side something. The minute he tries to do that, he's afraid his base is going to rise up. Look what he tried to negotiate a immigration deal and one tweet from Ann Coulter, that he was abandoning the base and Trump scurried away. What was the right way to approach China? To me, the right way to sign the Trans-Pacific trade deal. That brought 40% of global GDP into our alliance under American trade rules designed to American trade interests. Then you should have gone to the Europeans and gotten them, another 40% of global GDP on our side. Then you go to Xi jinping and you say, now we are going to negotiate new trade rules. It's going to be the world versus China on what are the right and fair rules of trade for the 21st century. Instead, Trump tore up TPP without reading it. He wouldn't know what it had in it if it hit him over the head. He said, I'm going to make the Europeans pay more for NATO, like, they're a French restaurant in Trump Tower. Got to pay more rent, Mr. Xi, Mr. Macron and got all caught up worrying about, auto tariffs on Germany. He completely abjured aligning himself with the EU on China, which has the same issues we have and said, I'm going to make this Trump versus Xi over who has the biggest tariff? Come on, Mr. Xi, let's see who as the biggest tariff, okay? When you do that, what you do is you trigger all the Chinese nationalist instincts to rally to Xi and not to you. You basically got what he got, which was the Chinese buying him off, basically, rather than making it the world against China on the right and fair universal trade rules, in which case, you leverage the reformers in China on your side. Go ahead. Larry Jacobs: That was a strategy that past Democratic and Republican presidents had been pursuing. Gabriel Oman, who's a famous Harvard professor, he wrote a book a few years ago called Thucydides Trap. What he does is he goes back to the 5th century BC, and he traces 16 instances in which you have established power. Tom Friedman: Graham Allison. Larry Jacobs: I'm sorry. Graham Allison, yeah. What you've got established power that's challenged by an up and coming power. Three quarters of those cases, going back to 5th century BC, there's war and often cataclysmic war. Do you think the United States and China are inching towards a situation where there could be a blunder that leads to a war? The South China Sea looks very, very dangerous these days. What do you think? Tom Friedman: Well, I think we should worry about it. I ended my column today by saying, China, Russia, please don't invade America because we're not who we used to be. I don't fear that China is going to invade America and take over Chinatown in LA or something like that, but they could definitely try to seize Taiwan in this vacuum. I was just talking some of my colleagues out there this morning about just that issue, some of my colleagues in Taiwan. I think we should be very, very concerned about that. We are always stronger when we are back buying alliance. One of the things that Trump is also broken is the Atlantic Alliance. The pew polling out of Europe is shocking. As many Germans trust China as they do America today. It used to be 3:1 or 2:1 before that. It's just shocking the reversal here. I find that four more years of this, and the Atlantic Alliance will be something. They'll teach a course on at the U of M in the International Relations Department, and it will be a history course. Larry Jacobs: I want to come back to Minnesota and Minneapolis. You've written pained columns about what's happening in your hometown. Clearly, the killing of George Floyd was an outrageous incident. It sparked protests around the world. It gave new power to Black Lives Matter. I want to read to something that David Brooks, a friend and colleague of yours wrote. He said, people, meaning the protesters, are responding to the failure of the mainstream, moderate, progressive formula for how to create a more equal pluralist America. I am a moderate guy, but the evidence doesn't support moderation when it comes to racial equity. Do you feel like what's happened with George Floyd and then the subsequent protests really an indictment on our failure to reach racial equity? Tom Friedman: Yeah, I think the way I see it, Larry, is that ever since the '60s and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, we put a lot of new, very important stuff on the books, and they were implemented in some cases on the books. But I think that the response to George Floyd and his killing and how it really expanded into a Black Lives Matter movement is really saying, well, we got to re energize all of that, and you got to do it intentionally. You can't just say, well, wait a minute, the law says this. You know what I mean? Or the regulation says this. I see this as the second great civil rights movement. When I see so many white people marching here in Washington, what I hear them saying, what I think of in my own life is you have to be intentional. You've got a business. It's not enough just to say, we have a black employee, and then say, well, we'd like to have more, but just can't find any. You hear that from some companies. Well, then maybe you should create an internship program, a mentorship program. Maybe you've got to actually go out and create that supply chain, and not just say, we've got our one or two. We're safe now. We got under the wire, of the 1960s. But we have to be, I think, at a whole different level. I think that's what's amazing about this moment. How many people want to get caught trying that, I think it's a bigger challenge. You got to be much more intentional. You can't just say help wanted, really looking for people of color. Maybe you actually go out and need to create mentorship programs and scholarships and real supply chains, supply lines to be able to get and broaden the base. That's why the column I wrote, I only wrote really one com about George Floyd was called Out of Many We. That we really need to change our motto from out of many one, which is that we're all going to meld together into this largely white defined idea of oneness to out of many we, which is a deeper form of pluralism, but that we can still come together and act as one around. The one becomes the byproduct, not the necessary goal. But I think that that's where I see this going. It pains me, though, to see what's happened to to Minneapolis. I do think that the City Council got ahead of itself. Really, in my own experience in life, reform is something you don't do to someone. Reform is something you do with someone. Lord knows, after the killing of George Floyd, there was a need for some real reform in not just the Minneapolis police force, but police forces around the country. But I think if you do it to people, not with people, you can really unravel something, and that seems to be what's happened. One of the things that's paining me so much is I can't be out there. I can't be out there walking the streets right now and really trying to understand it at a much deeper level and write about it in the way I'd like to write about it. I'm really dependent on you and other friends and reading the strip every day. Larry Jacobs: Let me ask you, let's go back to you and growing up in Minnesota. Your mother was a very accomplished bridge player. She was what's known as a life master, which [OVERLAPPING]. Tom Friedman: Senior life master. She was a [inaudible]. Larry Jacobs: I'd like bridge, but nowhere near that. I'm going to use that as a metaphor for a political situation. Imagine that Jeb Bush wins the Republican primary in 2016. He goes on and defeats Hillary Clinton. Play the same set of circumstances that we've seen since January 2017 to today. Do you see a different outcome? Could you imagine a competent Jeb Bush, which is part of his makeup, handling the coronavirus more like Germany or maybe if we got lucky like South Korea and Republicans on their way to re-election perhaps comfortably today. Tom Friedman: Hard to really say. I've written before that Trump I think deserves criticism on coronavirus, not so much for what he did or didn't do early when, frankly, it was big, hard and confusing. It's for what he's not doing now when it's so clear and easy. Just wear a mask. Practice social distancing, have a minimal plan of collaboration between states. This is just really not hard stuff. By the way, if you want the economy open, which I do, masks are your friends. Social distancing is your friend. It's not mask or jobs. It's mask for jobs. It's not mask or school, but mask for school. It's the unwillingness to do the simple easy things collaboratively that actually is undermining the very goals that he wants. Larry Jacobs: You don't think Jeb Bush would have done that? What I know of Jeb Bush [OVERLAPPING]. Tom Friedman: I think he would have done. Totally. Larry Jacobs: Exactly, he would have done that. It would be a different situation, a situation in which Republicans could be looking at re-election. Tom Friedman: I have no doubt that almost any other Republican would have done that. Would have gathered the scientists together and basically said, what is it we need? We need a plan that will maximize saving the most lives and the most livelihoods. How do we do that? We never had that plan. To this day, what is the Trump plan? In the face of a pandemic, you talk about being intentional. You have to be really intentional, because you're in a duel with Mother Nature, and she hasn't lost a duel with one of her species in 4.8 billion years. Larry Jacobs: Let me see if we can end on a slightly more positive note. Tom Friedman: I might need some drugs for that, Larry. [LAUGHTER] Larry Jacobs: You've been writing for years about what we need to do in terms of the environment and getting America on the path to clean energy, clean fuel and energy efficiency. Donald Trump, of course, has taken down regulations and torn up the Paris Accord and done other things that have set back our public policy. But meanwhile, the economy and consumers, they seem to be moving in the direction that you've been talking about for 15 years or more. Do you see that as a hopeful sign that the country is actually leading where the president didn't? Tom Friedman: It's a very good sign. It's driven really by the market. It's now cheaper to clean the world and keep the world clean than it is to make it dirty. Solar, wind energy efficiency, thanks to market and technological forces, have really reached near or at parity with fossil fuels. You look at the car companies. Look, who's the hottest company, Tesla, you can't make this up. Exxon Mobil got thrown out of the Dow and was replaced by Tesla or Salesforce. I guess it was Salesforce, but whatever, you can see the shift happening here. Every car company's going electric. Every power company knows that coal for generation and coal, diesel and increasingly natural gas are going to be stranded assets. The only thing now is, are we going to get there faster or slower, but we are going to get there. We are going in that direction, and a different president would have just accelerated it. But Trump can't stand in the way of it, because this is the market responding to what people want and technology moving down the cost volume curve where they can now have what they want, what we want, and that living clean, powering clean is now cheaper than doing it dirty. That was always what I was hoping for. I wish that Biden were running not on the Green New Deal, which is a term that I coined back in 2008. I wish he were running on what I call the Earth race. For JFK in the '60s, we wanted to have a space race. Who could be the first to put a man on the moon. I think America should be challenging itself in the world to the Earth race. Who can invent the most clean, green energy efficient technologies so men and women, plants and animals can live safely, securely here on Earth. AI think that's just great galvanizing concept. I'm still hoping for the Earth race it's not going to be in this election, but hopefully if Biden wins, we'll get the equivalent of it. Larry Jacobs: Well, there we go. That's the positive update. Tom Friedman: There you go. That's the [inaudible]. That's what Tom Friedman love. [LAUGHTER] Larry Jacobs: I've got a few announcements, but Tom, I want to thank you so much. I know you're under tremendous demand and our good friend and let's stay in touch and thank you so much. Tom Friedman: My pleasure, Larry. Thanks so much. I may take off. Larry Jacobs: Good. Take care. I just want to give you a heads up some upcoming programs. We've got a terrific program a week before election day to look at what's happening and get some insight from Vin Weber, Republican strategist, Justin Bowen, a Democratic strategist. They'll be back the day after the election and talk about what happened or what seems to be happening. Then about a week after election day, Jake Sullivan, who is one of the top people, maybe the top person, top advisor to Joe Biden on foreign policy will be coming in to chat. Jake is a Minnesotan and a good friend of the Humphrey Schools, and we look forward to that tremendously. We've got a lot of great programs coming up in December. Some of them are not about politics. We've got a famous novelist coming in, talk about his new novel and read from it. Do join us again. I want to let you know that all these programs are recorded and you can find them on YouTube. Here's the address. They're also available on podcast with all the major Spotify and Stitcher and also Amazon, I think. If you'd like to support programs like this, here's some information, please do. Thank you very much for joining us.