Global Alliances, Leadership, and the Shape of Our Post-Pandemic Future: A Conversation with Ian Bremmer

Michael Rivo: Welcome back to Blazing Trails. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios. What will a post-COVID world look like? How will this crisis impact globalization, change our education system, change our world? These are questions Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group, spends a lot of time thinking about. On today's episode, Ian discusses how this pandemic is reshaping our future and what we can expect from global alliances and leaders in the aftermath. Before we jump over to Ian, a quick word about Tableau. With Tableau, you can unlock insights from any data source to make better decisions fast. Whether it's tracking internal sales and marketing or the global economy, Tableau has the dashboards and tools you need to find the insights that matter. Learn more at Tableau or by clicking the link in our show notes. Now I'll hand it over to our host, Salesforce Co-Founder and EVP of Technology, Parker Harris.

Parker Harris: Ian, thanks for joining us today.

Ian Bremmer: Parker, great to be with you.

Parker Harris: Awesome. Well, let me just start by, we're in the middle of this public health crisis, economic crisis, the social injustice crisis, and frankly, a leadership crisis. How do you at the Eurasia Group think about recovery as we emerge from each of these crises and try to rebuild a more job sustainable and equal world?

Ian Bremmer: Well, first of all, we obviously think that the timelines are very different. I mean, a country like China, they had a second quarter, a small amount of growth, while the Americans and the Europeans were facing the worst quarter in our history. And that's in part because the pandemic hit China faster, earlier, but it also is because they're able with surveillance and with an authoritarian state, to ensure massive testing, but also full lockdown and complete compliance. So the supply chain was back up and running in China. Now, that's not something that we could do in the U. S. or in Europe. It's not something we'd want to be able to do in the U. S. or Europe. The good news for the United States is at least so far, the economic response has been both very strong and bipartisan. We saw that in the early days from Secretary Treasury Mnuchin, from Speaker of the House, Pelosi. We're not seeing that right now, as we get closer to the elections, though hopefully in the coming weeks, we will. The positive news has been Europe. It's been Chancellor Merkel, who, I mean frankly, if you look at her six months ago before the pandemic hit, you thought she was washed up, she was a lame duck. Her approval ratings had sunk and everyone was angry because she was the one that let the millions of refugees in. That was very unpopular in Germany and across Europe. Now, she's the poster child for getting pandemic right because she didn't cheerlead. She focused on science, on facts. And after getting Germany out of the worst of the first wave, she actually led a process to bail out the poorer countries in Europe, transferring wealth. And she got unanimity from 27 countries in Europe. At a time when no one's being unanimous about everything, they all agreed that they were going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars from the wealthy country to the poorer countries, so that they'd be able to pull themselves out of the worst economic crisis of our lifetime. And even if you're skeptical about the future of Europe, it's hard to say no to that. And so I think that we can look around the world and we can see even in the teeth of this crisis, that there are spots of effective leadership. And there are spots whether you're rich or poor, whether you're big or small, whether you're democratic or you're authoritarian, people are focusing on expertise and science. And it's helping us get through this pandemic.

Parker Harris: Yeah, it's amazing. And maybe Ian, we need more female leaders in the world when you speak of Chancellor Merkel and her success. When you look at... I mean, clearly, the crisis we have in the United States, unfortunately, sometimes it comes apart as an issue of how to respond to it. When you look at other countries Europe, are there good and bad of how they've dealt with the crisis? Are there other things we can learn?

Ian Bremmer: Sure. We learned that responding early is important and not politicizing the crisis is important, right? And I think, I mean, you're right, that there are a lot of women leaders. I mean, there aren't a lot of women leaders around the world, but of those that have been successful, New Zealand and Germany, of course, Norway, of course, there've been a lot that are women, but there are a bunch that are men too. South Korea, Vietnam, Greece, one of the poorest countries in Europe, going through a depression of their own, and they've responded incredibly effectively. The thing that you find in common of all of those countries is they recognize that this was such a severe crisis, that they couldn't make politics about it. And by the way, countries that were close to elections when the pandemic hit responded less effectively, I mean, it's unfortunate that we are in the midst of this electoral cycle coming up in just a couple of months in November, that definitely made it harder for everyone to work together, share information and not blame red state versus blue state in the U.S. And most of the countries that were successful, you didn't have that problem.

Parker Harris: Given that, would you advocate not having U. S. elections every four years to have more stability in governing?

Ian Bremmer: No, I wouldn't advocate that, but I'd like to advocate not having electoral cycle that lasts for almost two years, costs billions of dollars. I mean, nobody even talks about campaign finance reform anymore, but obviously, when you have to start running almost once you've won, if you're a house representative, it's a serious problem that makes leading a lot more challenging in our country.

Parker Harris: Yeah, absolutely. Well, in preparation for this interview, I was reading on your website, Eurasia Group, your top risks for 2020. And the second risk that you list, you call it the great decoupling. And specifically about U. S. and China separating around technology. And we've seen certainly the issues with Huawei more recently, TikTok. And you said that on your site when I was reading it that it's the most impactful geopolitical development for globalization since the Soviet Union collapsed. And I'm like, "Wow." In my industry, I see that as a huge impact, but that's a huge statement. Can you tell us more?

Ian Bremmer: Sure. Because if you think about what's been behind the optimism that most of us have in humanity over the past decades, it's been globalization. It's been the idea that goods and services and capital and people and ideas and data move faster and faster across borders. And that has created extraordinary... well, it's expanded our lifespans, it's led to incredible inventions and discoveries, right? It's one of the reasons why we're going to be able, hopefully, to develop a bunch of vaccines for this disease faster than humanity has ever been able to before. Now, there's no question that people have been left behind by globalization and that the winners have not been distributed equitably and governance has failed in responding to that, but still, that doesn't mean that globalization is broken. That means that governance is broken. This decision, both of the Chinese and the Americans, to decouple the worldwide web into two separate systems, our data, our filters, our cloud, our artificial intelligence, our apps, all of these things that are not just in our smartphone, but increasingly anything with a chip in it, right? I mean the internet of things means you're a smart home. It means your geo tracing. It means your biometrics. It means your smart house in your smart city. They're going to be split into two. And one of those will be dominated by Chinese corporations aligned with the state. And another will be largely American corporations operating in the West. That's the biggest break in the trajectory of globalization of our lifetimes. And it doesn't mean that the U. S. and China won't work together anymore. We're still going to buy a lot of our goods from the Chinese. We're still going to export energy and export food to them. So it's not the end of globalization, but it is an end of perhaps the most important part of globalization in the 21st century, and that not only means less efficiency, less growth and more risk, but it also means more dehumanization. When you think about why it is that we would ever dehumanize our fellow human beings, it's usually because we don't understand them. We don't have physical connection to them. We don't engage with them. when you live right next to them and spend time growing up with them, it's really hard to dehumanize. And what we're now doing on a global scale is saying that people that are connected to the Chinese system will increasingly not have any shared worldview or connection, or even conversations with people connected to those American apps. And I think that's a truly unfortunate thing. I don't blame the Americans for this. I mean, the Chinese were the ones that stopped Facebook and Google and Amazon from being able to operate in China. There's plenty of blame to go around here. But the reality that you're asking about is I think we've passed the point of no return of breaking apart these two tech systems. And if Biden's elected in November, it doesn't matter, right? This is Biden or Trump. I mean, they all agree on this. So it's a serious change in trajectory for the world.

Parker Harris: Yeah. And that, and I think we're already seeing countries having to choose. You look at France and meeting PPE or working with China because we all need to work together in the midst of this health crisis, but that health crisis and the health for PPE and France, as I understand it, is also agreeing to deploy more Chinese technologies, specifically Huawei networking equipment. And it's going to be interesting to see how it happens across the globe. The countries have to choose, and how will we react? How will the United States react and what will our relationship be when people choose sides? It's really unfortunate.

Ian Bremmer: I think you're going to see that the advanced industrial democracies, probably almost all of them, will be aligned very strongly with the United States. In part, because they're just not going to trust that Huawei is going to be able to make good on their contracts and their promises when the world's largest economy is working hard to squeeze them and shut them down and stop them from having semiconductors from Taiwanese companies and things like that. And part, because ultimately even if these governments and their leaders, many of them don't like Trump, they really are more aligned in terms of system and values and governance with the United States than they are with the Chinese. I think the question will be what about all of the other countries? And by the way, the UK has already made this shift, the Australians, the Japanese, New Zealand, Canada, right, is moving in that direction quickly. But what about Brazil, right? Where Bolsonaro... I mean, by far Brazil's most important trade partner, not the U. S., it's China. Even though he likes Trump, is he really going to cut off all that cash? What about all the countries in the world that are getting huge amounts of money from Belt and Road through China, and there isn't an American Marshall plan for them these days. We're not focusing on international aid and investment. We're focusing on the United States. Are they going to make decisions? Will China become the defacto data guarantor for a billion Africans? I mean, 80% of all external debt that is held from Sub- Saharan Africa is held by the Chinese. 80%. I was in Ethiopia right before the lockdowns and over a hundred million people in Ethiopia, you couldn't find a building with a crane on it that wasn't Chinese. They're building the country. So I think as we look forward 10, 20 years, that split increasingly looks like rich world versus not so rich world. And that's going to have very interesting implications for how humanity fights.

Parker Harris: Yeah, that's a framing future. And when I look at it from a technology angle, as a CTO at Salesforce, we started a company based on the internet and based on the power of the fact that the internet is global and that multinational corporations can use our service and access it anywhere in the world. But some of these trends that you're talking about are working against that. We see that in our business where when you think about data, there's more and more data sovereignty where countries, China, the United States, everyone wants to say, I'm going to keep the data in my country. It's going to be sovereign because data has value. And yet the value of that data is collaboration around that data regardless of where you are and leveraging the internet for that. And they're at odds. Do you see that getting worse over time? And what are ways that we might think of solving that direction?

Ian Bremmer: It is clearly right now getting worse. There is not, honestly speaking, an area of the U. S./ China relationship right now that is not getting worse. South China Sea, Taiwan, Hong Kong [ inaudible 00: 13:58], technology, intellectual property, trade. I mean, you name it, cultural exchange, blame for the original coverup for the coronavirus, I can keep going, right? Having said that, the fact that the United States and China are actively decoupling on technology does not mean that there is no area of tech that we can cooperate. For example, it's very clear that neither of our countries want the existence of lethal autonomous drones. It would be really good for the Americans and Chinese to coordinate on that. It should be obvious that we both want to move towards a vaccine faster and have transparency of data and be able to distribute it more effectively around the world, so we can all start getting back to our normal, normal lives. And, meanwhile, the U. S. says we're leaving the World Health Organization, and the Chinese are not providing full transparency with the WHO. So I think the way you fix this is by complexifying. It's by saying," Yes, there are areas of artificial intelligence and data where we don't trust the Chinese. It matters to national security, and we need to keep them out, and we're going to fight them." But, there are other areas where we really need to work with them around biotech, for example, and we need to share information, or otherwise, not only might we come to blows, but frankly, it's going to hurt both of us. I mean, the good news about U. S./ China, unlike the United States and the former Soviet Union because people love the Cold War sort of analogy, is that we do still need each other a lot, even in the middle of all of this fighting and name calling, the fact is that we want to buy inexpensive goods from China, even including PPE. And it would be hard for us to suddenly shift our supply chain out. And by the way, the NBA still wants their future to include Chinese fans and Chinese basketball players. And we want our universities and our colleges, especially once you get below the top tier, we want Chinese students to pay full freight tuition, or they're going to go bankrupt, a lot of them. And so I think the vested interests, both in our country and in China, are sufficiently deep and strong in where we do have co-dependence that the relationship is not going to break. This is not a cold war. What it really is, is a failed marriage, but we have kids and we're cohabitated, and that may be difficult emotionally, but for the sake of the kids, right, you're not going to throw things at each other. I kind of think that's where we are between the U. S. and China right now.

Parker Harris: Yeah. Well, let me shift the conversation. Salesforce has been greatly influenced by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. And one of the phrases we often use is the business of business is making the world a better place. That multinational corporations like Salesforce should lean in and not just build businesses, but do good in the world. One of the risks you talks about is that maybe multinational corporations aren't able to do that, or aren't able to step in. And could you explain a little bit more what you meant by that?

Ian Bremmer: Well, first of all, there definitely are CEOs and corporations that can do that and should do that. But I think we have to be honest with ourselves. I mean, at a time when we're seeing massive layoffs, when we're seeing a lot of companies that aren't even going to be around in two years, nevermind 10, and we all know that CEOs are incredibly well compensated, many would say far too well compensated, but they are some of the hardest working, most pressured people in the world, and when they're facing this kind of crisis, the idea that they're going to get away from the day to day to figure out the social contract for humanity, there is no way, right? I mean, the next 12, 18, 24, even 36 months for most CEOs in the fortune 500 are going to be to make sure they have growing businesses. And I just think we have to be honest about that. But, when I look at the tech companies, when I look at Salesforce, when I look at Google, when I look at Microsoft, I mean, here, I see the companies that are going to be doing the best that are truly accelerating, not only the disruption of new technologies, but also the opportunity for new technologies. They are the ones that are going to have to do a lot more. And it's kind of funny on this issue of the business of business and governance. I was talking just yesterday with my good friend Antonio Gutierrez, the secretary general. And as we're thinking about UNGA, the general assembly, the virtual general assembly coming up in the next month, one thing he thinks is critical is inclusive multilateralism, the idea that your stakeholders for international architecture, even treaties right now are all governments. Formally, they're all governments. And I think we both recognize that needs to change. That going forward, if you sign a treaty, you're going to want to have multinational corporations be a part of that because governments are becoming weaker, and they're becoming less capable of fulfilling a lot of the obligations that humanity is going to require of them. And I don't think it can be just about a few well-meaning techno-optimists and techno-utopians. I think you're going to have... if you want to integrate them, you have to do it formally. It has to be within an architecture of rule of law. It can't just be charitable donation because the trickle down from charitable donation over the last 40 years has not been functional in most of the world.

Parker Harris: Yeah. Well, I guess I'll fight back on one point you made. I do think corporations can do more. In our Q1 of this year, we leaned in hard. We became a mainly logistics company getting PPE from China and getting it to get places the need like New York City, out in California and San Francisco. And I do think we all can do more, but your point, we'd probably need to have the energy and the force of contracts, agreements, where we're saying we will do this together. And at Salesforce, we lead by values: trust, customer success, innovation, equality. Those are our top values. And I think the more corporations lead with values, but also lean in and work together multinationally to drive change, I think it's so important. And then we work with the governments as well. These multinationals coming together aren't going to become the new government.

Ian Bremmer: Parker, I completely agree with you. And I'm not saying Salesforce can't and hasn't done that at all. I wouldn't be on this call if that was the case, but I don't think you can say the same thing about the CEO of an airline in the United States right now, or a hotel company right now, or Disney right now. I don't think you can say the same thing about the CEO of Deutsche Bahn right now. And those are big companies. All I'm saying is when we look at the kind of disruption that has been and is going to be caused by this pandemic, there are a lot of fortune 500 companies out there that aren't going to make it. And I just think we have to understand what that landscape is going to look like. And also just how critical we're still going to be relying on governments for the next two years for an enormous amount of aid, an enormous amount of bailout and support, or the country is going to suffer because you and I both know that overwhelmingly the hardship is being worn on the back of the people that can least afford it, the people that aren't in the knowledge economy, the people that can't socially distance, and the countries for whom that's true as well.

Parker Harris: Yeah, absolutely. Let's shift the conversation and talk a little bit about education. We launched, in the middle of the pandemic, an offering called work. com. Initially, it focused on businesses and how do we help businesses get back to work and become productive again. On this past Tuesday, we announced work. com for schools, for education, and indicating our commitment to help school districts embrace the new era of digital learning because education needs to shift too, especially in the middle of this pandemic. A lot of innovation going on there. But the question to you is why is getting kids back to school and not just kids, but college students as well, either in person or online, why is that an essential as a country and a society?

Ian Bremmer: Well, one of the reasons why we have such incredible anger in the U. S. right now, one of the reasons we got Trump and why we got Bernie Sanders and so much antiestablishment sentiment is because so many people feel like the government has not taken care of them. The American dream does not apply to them, and they do not have the skills to retool for an economy that's changing so fast. Now we cannot afford to leave another generation behind. And if you say that education is going to break for a year or more of many of these kids, and we know who it's going to break for, it's going to break for the ones whose parents can't get them the tutors, can't have alternate arrangements for them. The ones who have no choice, but to go in and deal with whatever the local school teacher's unions and school bureaucracy brings to them. We cannot fail those people because the fact is that the speed up in displacing labor is not just coming from free trade, it's coming from all of the innovations that are incumbent on us to be even faster right now, so we can get through this pandemic. Those people will fail if we get education working for them as our first priority. It has to be the biggest thing. We cannot allow our frontline education workers to not have the ability to teach and teach safely the students that are there under their remit.

Parker Harris: Yeah. Completely agree. Earlier in the conversation you were talking about globalization and international students, especially higher education needs of full paid, full tuition students for the economic model of higher ed. And do you think that through this pandemic, there's going to be radical changes in the educational system in the next decade, two decades, because of the nature of the dependency of... the economic model is not really sustainable necessarily. It's a tough economic model. And I think during this pandemic, a lot of people that are looking at hybrid learning, online learning, is the four year degree still valid. There are some educational systems that are innovating, but I wonder, is there an opportunity for a lot more innovation in that space to educate all of these students?

Ian Bremmer: I mean, at the highest elite level, probably not as much change because the guild of going through Harvard and the incredible network that you have, the door openers that you have access to, which proves so much greater importance in a country as segmented and polarized as the United States than just having the basic content and skillset. I don't think that goes away. They will fight as hard as they can to ensure that that persists. They're an alumni network. They've got massive endowments. But once you get below that top 1% where it no longer applies, and you couple that with the fact that people need lifetime training, where the content actually really changes over time. Yeah. You're going to completely hybridize that people are going to be getting much more training through their workplaces, big economy is going to require much more modularization of the way that people actually teach. And by the way, that's going to be an enormous opportunity for all of these young people that are coming up and are highly literate in urban areas all over the world, not just in the advanced industrial economies. That's a big reason to bet on Sub- Saharan Africa. It's a big reason to bet on South and Southeast Asia, on Latin America, because that human capital is going to be unleashed by breaking the guilds for the non 1%. I think the 1% is going to stay very, very strong and calcified, but the rest is going to break down.

Parker Harris: Yeah. Completely agree. And that's actually why Salesforce has gotten into education market also, and with an offering we call Trailhead, to try to help with reeducation, to help people learn our tools, selfishly, because we need more experts in the world to go and implement our services, but also for example, veterans coming back to the United States needing to reenter the job market, underprivileged students, how do they get into the job market? So I agree. We need everyone to lean in hard on education.

Ian Bremmer: We need transparency, and we need adult organizations that are coming in and doing this right.

Parker Harris: Yeah. Okay. Final question. In the green room before, you were mentioning that the U. S. just announced normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and that that was an indication of a move of the U. S. away from the region and the region moving more towards Asia. Can you explain what you meant by that?

Ian Bremmer: Yeah. I mean, if you think about the last decades, the United States was seen not only as the promoter, the architect of global trade, but also the sheriff, the global sheriff and the promoter of global values. We see that the Americans are turning away from that. And one reason for that is because we're the largest energy producer now in the world, the energy revolution in the U. S. Another is the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was Obama's idea of the pivot to Asia, but a pivot to Asia is a pivot away from the Middle East. And frankly, that's been continuity between Obama and Trump. And I think that if Biden were elected, there'd be continuity with Biden too. So the turning it on its head, you asked me all about this decoupling with China, I don't think the United States is going to be promoting all of this," We make the Middle East safe for democracy, and we exploited their resources," rather they have to do it themselves. And the decision of the UAV, which not only massively diversifying away from energy, trying to get 21st century economy, they're also trying to be a 21st century political power. And that's why this morning, they decided that they were going to open diplomatic relations with Israel. Something that would have been inconceivable to the foreign policy establishment five or 10 years ago. I bet you, in the next six months, you're going to see a number of other Gulf States join them. And it's going to change the way we think about geopolitics in the region.

Parker Harris: Well, fascinating. Well, we look forward to seeing the future and appreciate your lens on the future. Ian, thanks so much for joining. Really appreciate sharing your experiences, your knowledge. Thanks for joining us today.

Michael Rivo: That was Parker Harris with Ian Bremmer, the founder of the Eurasia Group, speaking about how the pandemic is reshaping geopolitics. For insights into this topic and others head over to salesforce. com for resources to help guide you through today's changing economic and social environments. I'm Michael Rivo with Salesforce Studios. Thank you for joining us today.