Russia and China have formed a “no limits” partnership, bonding them on everything from manufacturing to technology to military might. And a major factor in the development of that partnership is a mutual disdain for a U.S.-led world order. This hour, we’ll talk with a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and other experts about what the budding alliance between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping means for American global leadership.
- +
Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] During World War II, the old saying, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” neatly described the U.S. Soviet relationship. Germany was a problem for both countries, so an alliance made sense. 80 years later, the Nazis are long gone and so is the alliance, as is the Soviet Union, for that matter. But another partnership has arisen, one in which Russia and China find common cause in everything from manufacturing to energy production to the development of artificial intelligence. The glue for that bond can be found in their common enemy. That, of course, is us, the United States. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Both Russia and China detest the idea of a world run by America. China sees itself as ready to take over as Russia clings to the idea of still being a superpower. How the U.S. works with other regional partners in Asia and the degree to which our nation inserts itself into conflicts over Ukraine and Taiwan may determine whether or not the temperature between the U.S. and Russia and China reaches a boiling point. So today, three experts, John J. Sullivan is former U.S. ambassador to Russia and deputy Secretary of State and author of the memoir “Midnight in Moscow.” Dan Schulman is former president and CEO of PayPal, and Ellen Bork is a foreign policy scholar and current fellow of the George W. Bush Institute. I spoke with them recently in front of a live audience at the George W. Bush Presidential Center. I guess I want to start by breaking the Russia China challenge, this enormous topic into some of its component parts. Ambassador Sullivan, you have said and seen firsthand that Vladimir Putin doesn’t just view the United States as an adversary. He views the United States as an enemy. How does that shape the actions he’s willing to take against U.S. interests?
John J. Sullivan [00:01:56] Well, it actually goes beyond that, he contends, and has for some time that Russia is at war with the United States. It’s a hybrid war, includes cyber activities, direct action in Western capitals, Berlin, a murder on the streets of Berlin by a KGB excuse me, an FSB colonel. The attack in Salisbury, he really believes he’s at war with the United States and that the United States and what he would call his word are vassals in NATO, that Russia is at war with him. And he treats us that way. And it ultimately stems from the hurt that he that lingers from the devastating what he considered the devastating debacle of the 20th century, which was the demise of the Soviet Union. And I’m happy to explain how that factors into his his thinking. We in the State Department and I served there proudly for six years. We hate to use the words enemy, war, Putin and his his nationalists in Russia. We’re the enemy in the State Department. We call people countries, competitors. If we’re really angry adversaries and we’re dealing with a country and a government in Moscow that treats us as the enemy, and that’s the way they think and they behave.
Krys Boyd [00:03:18] Would you say it’s as bad as it’s been throughout your career?
John J. Sullivan [00:03:21] As bad as it’s been in my lifetime, which includes what the Russians call the Caribbean crisis. What those of us in the West call the Cuban Missile Crisis, we see that by the daily invocation of Russia’s nuclear power, the threat to use a nuclear weapon if certain unspecified actions or specified actions are taken by the West, the threat of new nuclear testing. It’s as bad as it’s been, certainly in my my public career.
Krys Boyd [00:03:50] Ellen, China is also run by an authoritarian regime. But is Xi Jinping’s view of China’s relationship to the US and the potential consequences of a complete breakdown? Is it more nuanced than Vladimir Putin’s?
Ellen Bork [00:04:03] I don’t think it’s more nuanced. I would say that it’s it’s brazen. It’s confident. Xi Jinping has, you know, built his new approach to the to the international community and to the United States on a backdrop of economic growth that the United States assisted with believing that that would moderate the Communist Party and change the system and help integrate China. That, in my view, was never anyone at the top of the parties intention, and certainly not Xi Jinping’s. And he has used that foundation to launch a very aggressive effort to change the the world order, to undermine democracy, to change it, and to advance a different set of norms.
Krys Boyd [00:04:46] One arena in which both China and Russia can act out against the US is, of course, in cyberspace. Dan, you’ve noted there is no longer a clear separation between business and political concerns when it comes to tech development. Can you give some examples of how this is playing out?
Dan Schulman [00:05:04] Clearly, the business community is now part of an apparatus of political weaponry. Whether that means companies pulling out of countries. Boycotts. Whether it means tariffs and restrictions, whether it means figuring out what our trade policy will be in terms of what is sensitive technology or not. Clearly, we operate in a world right now that is very, very connected by technology. I think cyber is one of the existential threats that we have right now. Much of cyber is moving into military exercises. You no longer need to bomb command and control centers. You take them out through software. When Israel, for instance, attacked the Syrian reactor that was being built, they went into the Syrian radar systems. They basically rendered them neutral. So there were no no bogies on the radar. They came in perfectly over Turkey with six fighter jets bombed. It came out. The Syrians never fired a single missile before. That would have had to been done to the bombing of. Radar sites in a number of other places. Cyber is ferocious right now. I could probably find all of your information. Almost everybody in this audience on the dark Web and I have found out a lot of yours, but a identity, a consumer identity stolen every two seconds. A company is held up for ransom where every 14 seconds in that cyber community, we say there are only two types of companies. Those who have been hacked and those who don’t know they’ve been hacked. And like just the lesson, it says the cyber vector of attack, 85% of attacks are just hacktivists who are trying to make a point. They’re easy to defend against. They should never get through your defenses. About 14% are cyber criminals. And they, as you can hear from how much money they make on these things, they’re very determined and quite good. And maybe they’re successful like 10% of the time. Then there’s state sponsored cyber activities, which is less than 1% of the attack vector into enterprises, but they are basically 100% successful. And the thing is, you don’t know that they’re there and it is there embedded in infrastructure. They’re embedded in grids, and it is something we all really need to think very carefully about. A typical enterprise has 130 cyber breaches a year. The major players besides the US and and Israel are China, Russia, Iran, North Korea.
Krys Boyd [00:08:29] For Americans, a major source of disagreement with Russia and China is their open hostility to democracy and freedom of speech and expression. Ellen, for folks who haven’t followed his story closely, can you remind us how Jimmy Lai became such a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party?
Ellen Bork [00:08:46] Jimmy Lai is a self-made billionaire who is now in prison in Hong Kong. He arrived in Hong Kong as a teenager. Young teenager, went into the garment trade, came to New York, was actually inspired by one of his friends to read Hayek and became a real free market economist and devoted to rule of law as the foundation for a free society. And after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, he’d already made a lot of money in a clothing enterprise, sort of like The Gap. And at some point, he really offended the Chinese on the mainland. In Beijing, he used a sort of Chinese insult against somebody, and he ended up resigning from the company just to save them, his shareholders, their value. But he decided that as he saw Hong Kong was the agreement was that Hong Kong would be turned back to China in 1997, and that actually was in training for a decade beforehand, more than that. And seeing that coming, he founded a media company and then launched a newspaper, Apple Daily, which became wildly popular, ultimately the only pro-democracy editorial line in the city that remained the other’s work kind of chipped away at and and eventually they hated him. And after the democracy protests in 2019, that went on for several months in the spring of 2020, China imposed a national security law very quickly, and suddenly he and others were targeted. He’s been in prison already for three years, I think, on what you could call them, lesser charges, but they’re plenty serious. But he’s under he’s now on trial for the national security offenses, including foreign collusion, which effectively means refers to him meeting people in Washington. What we don’t actually I think not even the charges are completely clear, but that’s the understanding is that they want to get him because he talked to American policymakers and he wrote op eds and he tweeted things and he faces life in prison for that.
Krys Boyd [00:10:58] The national security law essentially asserts the same control over Hong Kong that Beijing has had over the rest of China?
Ellen Bork [00:11:03] Yes, it hasn’t changed that to completely that degree. But yes, it is a law that criminalizes anything that Beijing wants. It’s been adopted into the Hong Kong legal code, but it is a fiat from Beijing and it criminalizes subversion and terrorism and basically allows a parallel system of police and courts to go after. I mean, it can be just about anything.
Krys Boyd [00:11:32] Ambassador Sullivan, how would you characterize the working relationship between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping?
John J. Sullivan [00:11:39] Well, it it depends on where you’re sitting. If you’re sitting in Moscow, Xi Jinping is Vladimir Putin’s dear friend. The PRC is a vital, indispensable supporter, component promoter of the so-called special military operation. The Russian re invasion of Ukraine. The Russian Federation would have great difficulty in continuing its war of aggression in Ukraine without the support of the PRC, acknowledging the support of Tehran and Pyongyang, but the PRC history is really key From Beijing’s perspective, what is President Xi see when he sits across the table from from President Putin, his his dear friend and their so-called unlimited friendship, which is not unlimited and this is from a Russian who is a pro Putin Russian. What did Xi see? A peasant, who sells him oil and gas. A declining empire, no longer an empire, but valuable to G in his world vision, in his conception of a rising China that will continue inevitably from his point of view, rise. Putin doesn’t have that same sense of inevitability. Part of it is it lacks the ideological motivation of the communist ideology that motivated, at least nominally, the Soviet Union. This is pure nationalism on Putin’s part. Xi’s got a much bigger enterprise that he is he’s presiding over and it’s rise, he feels an inevitability, I believe. He doesn’t have the same sense of insecurity that Putin has.
Krys Boyd [00:13:30] Alright, we’re gonna do a wild pivot here. Dan, China has had a hard time getting its own citizens to widely adopt its digital currency, e-CNY. What are the chances it could have more success using e-CNY to challenge the primacy of the dollar as the preferred global currency reserve?
Dan Schulman [00:13:51] Well, I think when Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the weapons we used against Ukraine was basically turning off the swift network, which is how you do international settlements. Before that, swift was basically a neutral. Financial platform based in Brussels for legitimate reasons. But once it became weaponized, other countries took note of that as well. And nobody wanted to be the second or third country that where they could have swift turned against them. And there is a whole host of new emerging technologies that will undergird the financial system of the future. They really will mostly run on blockchain technologies. They are much more decentralized than what you experience today. And they are much cheaper, maybe 1/1000th the cost of transactions today and much faster as well. They settle in milliseconds as opposed to what can be hours, days or weeks for an international transaction. And theoretically, they should be much more inclusive. Countries around the world, China being one of them with the digital RMB. But you have Brazil with the Drex, which is their digital CBDC. India coming out with their own payment systems are all exploring different ways of taking advantage of this technology. I think the US, which really does undergird the entire financial system of the world right now, needs to be very careful and how we think about these new technologies, the stability, integrity of our system need to be sacrosanct. But we are falling behind in terms of our ability to have or certainty that we have primacy of the dollar. Once some of these non connected countries start to pull together their infrastructures through various platforms, you will start to see currencies flow that aren’t dollar based. And so it’s incumbent upon us to have our own digital dollar, to have stablecoins that are tied to fiat US currency, or we will lose our primacy. It’s happening around the world right now. It’s happening because of the weaponization of what we’re neutral platforms and the emergence of new technologies that make this easier to go do. China is working very hard to settle in the digital RMB. They’re working with the Middle East, all oil money. They’re forcing it to be settled in the digital RMB. They are massively incenting their consumers to start to use it now with discounts and a number of other things. And look, the one thing about the Chinese that is very different than us is they think about the long term. I mean, they’re thinking. A hundred years out. We in the business community are thinking the next quarter and in elections it’s either two years or four years that we’re thinking. And so I would not say just because their citizens are not adopting the digital RMB right now, that they have anything but a long term plan to control a lot of monetary flows through the digital RMB. And I would also just pose one other thing. I’d love to hear your thoughts around it. I think we need to be very careful and thoughtful about how we characterize and engage with China. It is not the same as decoupling from Russia. That was relatively easy and relatively painless. But although there are energy things that are a number of things, we are very intertwined with China. You go to Southeast Asia and you talk to the Singaporeans. They ask us, do not force us to choose. We live in this neighborhood like you’re forcing us to make choices. And it’s difficult. I think also when we try to deny them advance chips, which strategically I understand why we may want to do that. The main reason why they might want to invade Taiwan sooner than later is for chips. Taiwan produces 94% of the world’s advanced chips. They have to have access to chips. They must just like we have to have access to chips. We need to think about second and third order effects of our actions to make sure that we have a stable world as we possibly can. We just need to be thoughtful about it.
Krys Boyd [00:19:21] I would like to hear your thoughts, both of you, on this idea that countries may feel forced to choose to make a choice that they would prefer not to make given the current climate.
Ellen Bork [00:19:34] Well, I’d just say certainly that is a view that China would like to advance. I don’t doubt that the United States has hopes for the way some of our long standing partners, our allies will behave. China also has hopes about the way these things will go. It’s certainly at least mutual. I think China’s behavior is is frightening them, too. I take your point. I think it’s much further along than that. I think the United States is truly forcing them to choose. I think there’s a set of circumstances involving China’s ambitions, especially towards Taiwan, which I think goes beyond their technological needs.
John J. Sullivan [00:20:25] Well, following up on what what Dan said about the impossibility or that the extreme difficulty of decoupling the United States from from China, it was difficult enough and it hasn’t been completed decoupling from Russia. The energy ties between, you know, letting the Europeans languish without if Russia using one of the few weapons, it has its energy that it can export its oil and gas. That’s very difficult. I recall coming back to Washington when I was ambassador and meeting with senior leaders at the NSC and at the Treasury Department. This was before the war started. It was even before October, a late October of 2021, when we really thought that the Russians were going to invade. My mentioning cutting off swift heads exploded at the Treasury. It’s just not possible. You don’t understand, Mr. Ambassador. We got to be careful because we can’t have blowback on us on the West and our allies and partners. And this is about Russia. This isn’t about China, where the economic interdependence, whether it’s on pharmaceutical products that are necessary for our continued health and well-being, you name it, across the spectrum. It’s a much more complex relationship. So just to emphasize how difficult that is, just using the example of Russia, where I think we have not done as much to decouple, there’s been you know, there’s been reluctance to impose costs on the West and on the United States that would be politically difficult to bear, that I think are necessary to address the aggressive challenge to the West that Russia poses. If these are complex issues, we haven’t done enough with respect to Russia. And I think we underestimate the challenge that China poses.
Krys Boyd [00:22:23] Is the swift banking system secure?
Dan Schulman [00:22:30] Nothing is secure. Just to be very clear, in the banking system. Every single day we take a record of our data and file it in cold storage offline. That’s when it’s safe. If it’s connected, it’s not safe. It’s really that simple. Nobody does a great job at it right now. It’s impossible to really keep people out. Like firewalls, like moats and turrets that we used to put up to keep people out. It’s impossible. I know everybody’s username and password in this room. I know them. I can just imitate you coming in. What I can’t imitate is where you are and other data points. It’s now about what we call data loss prevention, stopping data from leaving as opposed to stopping people from entering. You can’t do that anymore. Even our, you know. Top secret, you know, things that we where we have, you know, classified… they’ve been compromised. Cyber is a thing that is lurking in the background. Luckily, we are by far the best at cyber in the world. Russia, I think we are all quite worried about what they could do through Dancing Bear and a number of other things on the electrical grids and that kind of thing. We’ve been quite successful at stopping almost all of that. There are countries now that this is their primary way of either wreaking havoc or control. I would say China if China wants to be in something, they are. Bye bye. Same with us.
Krys Boyd [00:24:39] Ellen. Last year, the FBI arrested two Chinese nationals living in New York City and accused them of running a surveillance and intimidation operation aimed at Chinese dissidents living overseas, in this case living in the United States. And there might be, as I understand it, more than 100 of these secret police stations set up by the Chinese government in countries around the world. What sort of danger exist for Chinese democracy and human and religious rights activists even after they’re able to leave the country?
Ellen Bork [00:25:08] It’s enormous. Thankfully, our law enforcement authorities are taking this very seriously. But this is a huge problem. They’ve also indicted in absentia a lot of Chinese secret police for harassment via the Internet and social media and that kind of thing. And recently indicted actually, I think they indicted someone who was known as a democracy activist. They sort of turned in some way. I think it has alarmed the diaspora quite a lot. There are other examples of Chinese state sort of influence activities. Some of the harsher ones involved there was some reporting on an APEC summit in San Francisco that was just revealed involving coordination between Chinese diplomats and Chinese front organizations, including some physical intimidation at the event. It’s very disturbing. China has a massive, broad and aggressive influence effort, some of which is or a lot of which is aimed at our states and localities. That is an approach that dates back to Mao and they still endorse it. Xi Jinping has reinvigorated this. Typically, they refer to it as their united front, which effectively refers to co-opting nonparty members of various kinds. A lot of them can be Chinese diaspora, but they also target our local politicians, governors, mayors, and there are other kinds of activities, including people to people exchanges, some of which are, you know, appear benign. And and from our position, they are benign. People are interested in China. They want to engage. They want to have sister city relationships. They want to have people come and speak to them. But from the Chinese side, it is part of a strategy. The Hoover Institution had a report several years ago in which they said every exchange is has a political motive behind it. Having worked on that, I think that’s really true. It’s quite disturbing. I have to say, this is not to say China has people that do this work for them. The vast majority of Chinese are not engaged on behalf of the party. They they unfortunately, they can be intimidated or pressed into service. And that is terrible. They shouldn’t be. And no one should think that any Chinese citizen in the United States or any Chinese-American is working for the Communist Party, that we have to make a distinction between the Chinese people and the party itself.
Krys Boyd [00:27:48] I was going to ask you, though, how do you fight this very serious potential threat without engendering a climate of xenophobia?
Ellen Bork [00:27:57] I think with great thoughtfulness and caution. I think it’s very important to hear from our leaders and to educate ourselves about the way China operates. So it’s being kind of attuned to what the message is from China. The Chinese ambassador recently gave a speech in New York, and one of the things he said was the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism is a fallacy. It’s not. But there are a lot of insidious messages that are designed to frankly discredit the United States or our values in its own citizens eyes. And I think most people, once they twig to that, won’t be so influenced. But it is a concerted effort by the Chinese and it just requires a lot of awareness and information. We should be hearing a bit more from the Biden administration about this. The Trump administration did do a very good job, particularly Secretary Pompeo of speaking. He spoke to our governors and explained the ways in which they were being targeted. And he canceled a cabinet summit because it was organized by a Chinese United Front organization. So, it’s partly that China makes it very difficult for American citizens to interact freely with their approach. I think if we could be in charge of interacting with any Chinese person that we wanted or having a university relationship that we wanted without sort of the involvement of the party, or its proxies, that would be great. But that isn’t now the way it works. So it just requires a bit of vigilance and awareness of really, because the people who are the first victims of this are the Chinese people themselves.
Krys Boyd [00:29:51] Ambassador Sullivan, we’re starting to hear reports of Russian operatives trying to influence influencers in certain cases. Is this a setup as sophisticated as what we’ve just been talking about that China has engaged in, or is it something very different?
John J. Sullivan [00:30:05] Well, it’s it’s part of a larger problem that the United States confronts. It’s not just China. It’s not just Russia. It includes Iran trying to influence the United States, divide us, influence our elections. The Russians, my perception is they’re far more experienced in doing these things. Whether it’s cyber disinformation campaigns, direct action. I was in Mexico City last week and I was looking for Trotsky where Stalin had Trotsky in 1940 illuminating an enemy. The Russians have a lot more experience with this. They are. One of my colleagues once told me at an embassy, Moscow, he said this is the type of government that you get and the type of activities abroad that you get when you make a career KGB man, your president and now president for life. We relied on a large number of third country nationals, mostly Russians, to help with the basic operations of the embassy, which is the model the State Department uses around the world at every one of our facilities. And I write about this in my book. We had a long term. He must have been employed by us for more than 20 years. Beloved employee at the embassy. Everybody really was just a big fan of this guy. He was an important colleague and worker. And one day I got a report that we had to separate him and we had a fire him. Why? He was interviewed by our leader, senior FBI agent at the embassy. He was approached by the FSB and we minded that his teenage son had a very serious health condition and that he needed expensive medical treatment. I interrupted the FBI special agent. I said, so they were offering him medical care. He said, no. The pitch was this medical care that you’ve already procured for your son that has cost an enormous amount of money. He will lose tomorrow unless you do X, Y, and Z for us. We, the United States, put that Russian, our friend in that position, to be exploited by the FSB. What’s a father going to say to an FSB officer who makes that pitch?
Krys Boyd [00:32:33] And in terms of Russian dissidents living overseas, Russia has more than once quite openly assassinated them.
John J. Sullivan [00:32:41] Yes.
Krys Boyd [00:32:41] I don’t believe this has happened on U.S. soil.
John J. Sullivan [00:32:47] Not yet.
Krys Boyd [00:32:47] Is there reason to believe it could happen here?
John J. Sullivan [00:32:48] There’s more than reason to believe that it can happen here. I predict it will happen here. It may not be a US citizen. It may have already happened here and we don’t know it. It is been their modus operandi going back decades to the the KGB and the NKVD. It’s something that Putin values because it it empowers the FSB and the SVR and the GRU, the three principal intelligence services security services of the Russian Federation. It’s where he comes from. It’s who he is. He is, as he describes himself, a KGB man. That was been his whole career since a professional career, since the mid 70s. And he he’s famously been quoted as saying there’s no such thing as a former KGB man. This is what he does. And why is it important to him? So he sent this to the FSB, sent this colonel across a coffee to murder on the streets of Berlin, a Chechen who had fought against the Russians in the wars in Chechnya shot to death in a public park in front of a lot of innocent Germans. Arrested, convicted and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment, was traded on August 1st as part of the big detainee transfer. The first person that got off the aircraft that landed in Moscow to bring the Russian detainees home was Kraskov. There was a red carpet that led out to the stairs. Putin walked out onto the red carpet and embraced this guy when he got off the plane. It sends a message to them and to all Russians. These are my people. These are how we operate. And these are the people I hug and honor.
Krys Boyd [00:34:41] Dan, you said the US continues to lead the world in AI development and cyber. I don’t know if that’s for the moment, but if I have this correct, you do think that the reason is cultural? More than anything. Can you talk about that?
Dan Schulman [00:34:55] Well, I think there are numerous things we need to think about on the AI front. First, I think AI is evolving well more rapidly than most people imagine. For those of us who have gotten to play around with the editions that have not been released yet on AI, we’re moving to an AGI world. I would predict in the next two maximum three years. That’s an artificial general intelligence world.
Krys Boyd [00:35:28] Excuse me for interrupting you. What does that mean?
Dan Schulman [00:35:30] It basically means you have machines that will think like humans, but better. In many ways. Better. They can do iterations. Hundreds of millions of iterations to get better. You know, we put in like ten kilobytes of information when we tap our phone and use our thumbs and computers in that same time frame are doing hundreds and hundreds of millions of iterations just to give you the asymmetry between how fast a machine can learn and a human can learn. So AGI is coming very, very rapidly. It will shift a number of things, both that I think are important, both in the business environment, very much in the political environment, because we could see unemployment levels spike up and that is a very plausible scenario. And if you have even 10 or 15% unemployment in a democracy, that’s a very difficult thing for a democracy to have unless you are taking care of those 10 or 15% people who are unemployed. Also, AI is going to be the leading edge of military applications, whether it be cyber disinformation. I could pull together a video of the ambassador from this meeting that we’re having here. I am assuming it’s being recorded and be able to very quickly have this video come up telling him that he really wants to come out to the world, that he’s had a drinking problem for a long time. And, you know, but he really wants to share this because he thinks it’s really important to go and do that and he wants to help people, etc.. But it’s very hard for him and it will be perfect. Perfect. We’ll have all the intonations, all of his gestures, where his eyes go, his pauses, everything. And so you’ll have massive forms of disinformation going out and you will have military applications of AI where we will be taking massive amounts of information and data and doing targeting on a fully autonomous basis. And so the the race to win the AI war is ferocious. It is ferocious. And there’s no stopping it. By the way, in case anybody was thinking we were going to stop it, because you have company versus company competition and country versus country competition going on. And the US clearly wants to be the leader in AI. And it means two things. One, we have to have great compute power. We have to have great chips and chips today and a little chip about this big have between 10 and 15 billion transistors on them today. 10 to 15 billion transistors. You add like a subatomic atomic layer and you’re doing it. The US only has about 4% of our ships, as I mentioned. And if the ships act is successful in 5 to 10 years, we’ll be able to satisfy 14% of our ship demand inside the US. I would say we probably will not be successful on that. If I look at what’s happening with Intel and others who are trying to move into this. So Taiwan becomes massively important and that’s why I’m saying we need to be very careful about not giving China a reason to go after Taiwan to get those advanced chips. But one of the things about technology that’s really interesting from a cultural perspective is here in the US, if we make mistakes, we are not. We don’t find ourselves disappeared one day. We made a mistake. We screwed up. Our AI system hallucinated. You know, it said something that was not right. And then we fix it, and we go on to the next iteration. We’re iterating. If in China, if you’re one of the top AI companies and they’re three of them there. They’re outstanding. If their CEOs put out an AI model that basically says something about Tiananmen Square, that the government doesn’t want to remember these models. It’s hard to know exactly how they’re thinking. Those CEOs risk not being the CEO of their companies getting more and more. They have access to chips right now, which I think is okay, although it’s being reduced. But culturally, it’s going to be very hard for them to keep up it with a U.S. based system that has much more flexibility on mistakes of information.
Krys Boyd [00:41:12] Ellen and Ambassador Sullivan, if we are soon to inhabit the terrifying world that Dan has just describe for us, and I have no reason to doubt that.
Dan Schulman [00:41:29] I’m saying.
Krys Boyd [00:41:33] Clearly, if we inhabit a country where despite being a democracy, it is harder than ever to trust institutions and government and officials and official accounts of things for some leaders and some voters, the sense may be that what you want to do is just consolidate power and start making decisions in a less than democratic way. How do we as a society protect ourselves from the impulse that tells us that we need to move away from democracy in order to be safe and get things done?
John J. Sullivan [00:42:06] Putin recognizes and he recognizes, a, how significant this is and the limitations on their ability to keep up with the West and in particular, the United States. So what does he fall back on? His muscle memory. He’s a KGB man. They’re going to try to piggyback on what we’re doing through espionage and any other means that that they can. But look, our open society has attracted in our history the best and the brightest. They’ve wanted to come here. They’ve helped us thrive. They helped us succeed with the Manhattan Project. Another life or death moment in some ways for for the Western and democracy. So we’ve done it before. It’s on a much bigger scale now with AI, but I’d much rather be in our position than in Putin’s.
Krys Boyd [00:42:57] Dan, final thoughts?
Dan Schulman [00:42:58] Yeah, I think it’s a great final question, especially here at the Bush Center, which is all about trying to figure out how to strengthen democracy. Look, my favorite quote of democracy is “democracy needs to be more than two wolves and one lamb, voting on what to have for dinner.” Okay. Which basically means that we have to rise above our own self-interest. Right. We have to put the the bigger picture ahead of our individual selves, which means, one, we need to be able to talk to each other. And this and our country is very divided and it’s very hard to go and do that. And we need to break that down in centers like this, have a real role in making that happen. We need to make sure we have facts that we can debate and I can create misinformation. As I as I talked about. But we can water market. We can do that. And so we need to have the courage to be able to talk about the issues. And that is what makes us strong.
Krys Boyd [00:43:59] Thank you all for the conversation. Really appreciate it. My guests this hour were foreign policy expert Ellen Bork, a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John J. Sullivan and former PayPal president and CEO Dan Shulman. We spoke recently at an event at the George W Bush Presidential Center. Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for KERA Think. Our website is think.kera.org. There you can find out about upcoming shows and sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
