In this episode of The Future of Liberty with Governor Mitch Daniels, Walter Russell Mead argues that America’s security and prosperity are inseparable from the freedom of other nations. He explores how U.S. engagement in maintaining a balance of power has long supported global liberty, and examines how a new era—defined by rapid technological change, shifting economic power, and the resurgence of authoritarian rivals like China and Russia—is reshaping the relationship between American and global freedom.
In this episode of The Future of Liberty with Governor Mitch Daniels, Walter Russell Mead argues that America’s security and prosperity are inseparable from the freedom of other nations. He explores how U.S. engagement in maintaining a balance of power has long supported global liberty, and examines how a new era—defined by rapid technological change, shifting economic power, and the resurgence of authoritarian rivals like China and Russia—is reshaping the relationship between American and global freedom.
Intro (00:02):
Welcome to The Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels (00:18):
We welcome our audience to the latest installment of The Future of Liberty, a podcast sponsored by the Liberty Fund, an organization committed now for seven decades to the preservation and promotion of the texts and the best that has been said and written about human freedom and dignity.
(00:36):
We've had some tremendous guests on this podcast, but none I've been more grateful to or excited about than today's. Walter Russell Mead, scholar, author, noted historian for a long time has in recent years become, in my judgment, the most persuasive and probably the most cosmopolitan commentator on world events through his columns in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. And if today's media environment doesn't allow any one person to become, let's say, today's Walter Lippmann, but if it did, I'd be talking to him right now. Welcome to our podcast, Dr. Mead.
Walter Russell Mead (01:16):
Well, thank you so much for having me on. It's a real privilege.
Mitch Daniels (01:20):
Let me start by asking you a question with its roots in history. We've seen the continuation or maybe it's the resumption of a very old debate about the role of the U.S. in the world. Are we simply to be an example of liberty or its promoter? From George Washington to John Quincy Adams, to Woodrow Wilson, to JFK, we've oscillated between what is sometimes called isolationism, interventionism, some say realism, which is a label which has occasionally been attached to you. How would you describe today's ... Before we make any normative judgments, how would you describe today's role of the U.S. in the world?
Walter Russell Mead (02:07):
Right. Well, great question, and like a lot of great questions, it's hard to answer, it's easier to ask it than to answer, but I guess looking back at history to begin with, the U.S. has both ... I think the most important thing we can do for the rest of the world is, in fact, to be an example of a free society that works here at home. And by that work, I don't just mean produces a good GDP and an ever-growing pile of consumer goods, but that produces men and women who have the strength of character and ideals and purpose to maintain a free society, because without a certain degree of virtue, freedom simply will not continue. And so that historical test is something, I think, that in every generation Americans need to succeed at, both for our own good and for the purposes of demonstrating to the world that it is possible. And that if we're not doing that, no matter what else we're doing, we're not going to be particularly effective at promoting liberty.
(03:30):
But it is also true that the opposition that some people claim to see between our ideals and our self-interests, I think, is often overstated. I do think George W. Bush maybe went a little far in his second inaugural when he said there is no difference between our interests and our principles. They are the same. That in real life turns out to be a line you just can't walk.
(04:00):
But I do think that if you ask yourself, "What does America want from the rest of the world in terms of our own security and prosperity?" These interests are actually linked to the freedoms of other peoples and countries. That is to say, it is bad for us if a single power dominates Europe, it is bad for us if a single power dominates Asia.
(04:30):
So what does that mean? It means that America's interests want to see the liberty of people in Europe, the liberty of people in Asia to live their own lives in the way that they would like to. So there's a kind of an objective link between American national interests and a world that is if not perfectly free with flourishing democracies everywhere, a world in which the right of self-determination by peoples is being upheld and defended. And so it means that in moments like now, say, when China is seen as a threat to the freedom of other countries in Asia, those countries naturally turn to us as somebody who has a stake in the same problem that they confront.
Mitch Daniels (05:23):
It's sometimes been said that, if I can call it a mission, or the example anyway that you just described is noble, it's sometimes been ... often been extended ... Madeleine Albright or someone coined the term the essential power. Are we essential in the world beyond our own interests? And if so, what does that mean these days?
Walter Russell Mead (05:49):
Right. Well, I think she was speaking at what Charles Krauthammer called the unipolar moments when after the fall of the Soviet Union and before the rise of China, America was a sort of dominant in the way that we were right after 1945 when the rest of the world had been ruined by World War II and we'd been enriched by it perversely. So I think something that you might've said in 1993 or '94 is not going to be applicable necessarily.
(06:24):
But I will say this, I think without America's investment and engagement in this idea of liberty for nations that then create a balance of power that favors our security, I am not sure that the Europeans could have defeated Nazi Germany without us. In fact, I don't think they could. Japan might not have been defeated without our help, the Soviet Union. So our role is at certain moments a necessary one for the preservation of any kind of international freedom, and we need to be aware of that. I think we shouldn't be too puffed up and vain about it and prance around the world, boasting of our, "You all need us, and we are the greatest, and you should all sit in the back seat." That's generally not a great way to get things done.
Mitch Daniels (07:30):
Well, you among others have cautioned that it's not unthinkable that we might have to play that role again, that events could force that. And we'll come to that maybe here in a few minutes.
(07:40):
Well, let's prance around the world if you're willing to, because again, there's no one I can invite on this program better equipped to do that. China's the natural place to start. How would you describe President Xi's ultimate goals? I remember reading with some reassurance though Henry Kissinger somewhere many years ago saying, "Well, China has never really wanted to be a hegemon outside its own part of the world," but they sure act one like they'd like to now.
Walter Russell Mead (08:14):
Well, the world has changed, and China's been around for thousands of years, and during most of that time, you couldn't sail across the Pacific if you wanted to. So China didn't have a history of wanting to be globally hegemonic, but it had a very strong history of wanting to be hegemonic in everything that it could get to. And so the distinction between China's historically limited regional aspirations and its current, more global aspirations is more a function of technology. I mean, the Roman Empire didn't try to conquer North America and South America. They might well have if they'd known they were there and had a way to get over there.
(09:03):
So I do think, look, I think Xi Jinping genuinely believes two things. One is that a dominant China is the key to global stability, prosperity, and, as he might say, harmony. And that in that sense, China is an indispensable nation, and that the Chinese Communist Party, the security of the power of the Communist Party of China, is essential for China to be able to play this global role. And he sees those things as connected. He will not sacrifice the security of Chinese communist rule for some foreign adventure. He's not going to risk getting overthrown because he's trying to do something in Venezuela. But at the same time, he believes that by showing that the Chinese Communist Party is able to make China great again, so to speak, that helps to underwrite the security of communist rule at home.
Mitch Daniels (10:12):
As ominous as their growing power, technological emergence, all of that is, would you rather have his problems or ours? He's not without challenges.
Walter Russell Mead (10:24):
Yeah. Look, I think it remains the case that the United States is uniquely blessed among the powers of the world. Our resource base, if you compare how much agricultural land we have, if we were forced to live simply on our own resources, on what we have in our own territory, we would be much better off than China faced with that same condition. And our geographical position between Mexico and our 51st state, as I believe the current president regards it, Canada, even when we provoke them, and we often do, they do not threaten us in the way that the neighbors of many other powers threaten them. So we have a certain security in our hemisphere, a prosperity that is underwritten by the natural resources of the continent. And I would also say a flourishing and dynamic social culture of entrepreneurialism, of openness to new technology and change. And that is a trifecta of advantages. The Chinese are not without advantages, but I think I like our place better than I would like theirs.
Mitch Daniels (11:53):
Then to ask you about somebody who claims to feel threatened in his neighborhood, Vladimir Putin, how do you assess his ultimate goals even beyond the war that he's conducting right now?
Walter Russell Mead (12:11):
Well, I think Vladimir Putin wants to make Russia great again. For him, Russia preserving Russian civilization, Russian power, extending Russia's boundaries, this is in his DNA. He's not a communist. In fact, he hates the communists because he's much more like a 19th-century Russian imperialist than he is like a 20th-century Soviet communist.
Mitch Daniels (12:44):
I just saw that he--and I didn't see the rationale--blaming Lenin in part for the dissolution of the Russian Empire. I mean, I'll have to go back and look. Lenin gave some up temporarily, but he reclaimed it after the communistic power.
Walter Russell Mead (13:01):
What Putin didn't like was that Lenin tried to bill the national consciousness of some of the minorities in the Russian Empire. So the whole thing of dividing the empire so there's a Republic of Armenia, a Republic of Georgia, that was a no-no for Putin.
Mitch Daniels (13:26):
I don't think it's a common view, it's the common view in Europe, but it's not an unheard view. The prime minister of Estonia said not too long ago, "It's not a matter of if Putin will invade a NATO country; it's when." Is that too alarmist?
Walter Russell Mead (13:44):
Well, I think, again, with Russia, I think George Kennan made the point. And by the way, the key point in his article about Russia, his famous X Article, or the long telegram as people have seen, was that, look, our problem with these people is not actually that they are communists; it is that they are Russian. And he had a very, very thoughtful reasoning behind that.
(14:12):
But if the Russian will probe with the bayonet until it encounters steel resistance, and then it will stop. And so Kennan's idea was first Kennan did not say, "You can never make a deal with Russia. You can never reach a mutually beneficial arrangement." But the precondition for that is showing them demonstrating that they can't simply increase their power by pushing whether military or in another way. Only when they've recognized real limits on what they can do will they then be in a position ... will you be in a position to say, "Okay, now that's your side of the lake. This is my side of the lake. Now let's talk about what happens in the lake or whatever."
Mitch Daniels (15:02):
Well, it was only yesterday, it seems, back in that unipolar moment you mentioned back when that pesky history that ended briefly restarted itself. But we told ourselves that these countries, having encountered freer capitalist markets and so forth, would inevitably move toward freer political institutions. Instead, we got the opposite. Different circumstances brought these two strong men to the positions of apparently complete control. Will these systems survive the passing of the two strong men, or are they embedded, do you think? Are they maybe more natural in the cultures of those two countries?
Walter Russell Mead (15:52):
Well, I think communist parties have demonstrated real reliance in outliving their charismatic founders. So China has already passed from the death of Mao, and the Communist Party rule survived there. Castro died in Cuba, and communism has continued because communism builds a set of institutions, and the people in those institutions want to keep their power, so they tend to band together if the system is threatened.
(16:31):
So I would say unless there's some huge catastrophe and Xi perishes as a result of overwhelming social unrest or something, Chinese communist rule is likely to continue after his death or retirement.
(16:51):
In Russia, it's a little bit different. There, I think, what you see is a kind of a modern form of feudalism, and the communists, in a way, were this way. When you have a strong czar, then everything in theory belongs to the state. When you had weak czars like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, what you saw was that the Duke of Azerbaijan declared independence. "I'm the king of Azerbaijan." So the same guy that ruled Azerbaijan as a communist under the USSR emerges as the ruler of independent, free, non-communist Azerbaijan.
(17:38):
And Russian privatization went a lot of the same way that the person who ran the Russian steel industry as a communist minister then emerged to run a privatized steel industry as an oligarch. So Putin is Putin after the weak czar Yeltsin, Putin has become a strong czar. And now to extend in Russia, he does own everything. If he doesn't want you to have something, you lose it. You are exactly as rich or as poor as Vladimir Putin thinks you should be.
(18:15):
Now if his rule is weakened, things in Ukraine, for example, don't go well or whatever, he'd become weaker as a czar. I think we saw some of that with Primakov, sorry, with the Wagner Group's head trying to create it, and Putin crushed it. So if Putin might be succeeded by a weak czar or a strong czar, that system may continue for a while in Russia.
Mitch Daniels (18:46):
It may, but I was just prepared to ask you that among oligarchs, I mean, there is the prospect of revolt from within. As far as I can tell, Xi has been very effective in stamping out, particularly people who rose to very prominent economic status.
(19:07):
Let me ask you this question. Ever since the information technology revolution began, people have speculated as to whether these new technologies would empower people, empower individuals, create greater freedom, or become tools of oppression. When I look at those two countries, and I'm sure there's things I don't see, but in Putin's Russia, I don't see the use of technology effectively to stamp out unrest. The social credit system and things we are watching in China seem to head the other direction. Is it possible that Russia and Putin and his potential successors are more vulnerable, they have not built that particular tool or institution?
Walter Russell Mead (20:02):
I think back in the 1920s when radio was the hot new medium, everybody used to say, "Oh, this is going to democratize everything because it will democratize the spread of information." But people like Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini were actually able to harness radio very effectively to control information and to increase their hold over their populations. So I think, in many ways, the internet works in that way.
(20:37):
To say that technology automatically favors liberty over authoritarianism is not quite true. I think more than what technology does is it turns up the volume on whatever people are doing. It doesn't change the nature of what they're doing as much as we think. So in a free society, the rise of these technologies may actually empower individuals. In an effective authoritarianism like Xi's China, they can empower the state. And in a weak or sloppy authoritarian environment, their effect can go either way depending on the competence and the vision of the ruler.
Mitch Daniels (21:24):
Yeah, this rather interesting book, the fellow's name is Gurri, if I don't mispronounce it, the former CIA analyst, The Revolt of the Publics, I think is the name. His central insight is that when institutions, public or private, lose their monopoly over information, inevitably, their authority is undermined. And so we see that all over, both all over the world in multiple contexts, but I don't yet see it in Xi's China. And maybe that just substantiates the point you just made.
Walter Russell Mead (21:56):
Yeah, it happened for a while. Early in the internet, China was more open to information. And Xi Jinping, one of his things that he really focused on was building what they call the great cyber wall of China to seal off that internet increasingly. Putin has been doing the same thing and many other authoritarian states. North Korea has an internet now, but you're not going to find anything on that internet that the Kim dynasty doesn't want you to see.
Mitch Daniels (22:32):
Right. You've written for a long time, you've illuminated a lot of us about events in a part of the world that you just wrote, President Trump hopes will become quiet: the Middle East. Actually, it seemed quiet for a little while. Now it's back front and center for various reasons. And so I wanted to ask you, what are the prospects that the Middle East changes in some direction that people like Trump would find encouraging?
Walter Russell Mead (23:05):
Well, we should start with the observation that Americans generally think of the Middle East as a problem to be solved, and most Middle Easterners think of it as a reality that must be lived with, and that leads to very different kinds of agendas. I actually think the Middle Easterners understand their region better than we do.
Mitch Daniels (23:30):
Not surprised.
Walter Russell Mead (23:31):
Right. It was about 30 years ago, I had the chance to go visit the ruins of Troy near the Hellespont in Turkey. You stand on this mound, and you realize 13 cities lie underneath you over thousands of years of history, most of them sacked and burned in kind of the way Homer described it. And actually, you can see, if you look across the strait into Europe, the monument to the Gallipoli battle, where in World War I, people are fighting in the same place.
(24:09):
And I have to say ever since that experience, I've not been someone who believed that a permanent peaceful order in the Middle East that has not been there for thousands of years is going to miraculously appear during my lifetime. I hope it does, but I don't think it will. And I think what we've seen is really ... that doesn't mean that nothing happens in the Middle East, and it's changeless and so on.
(24:39):
In the last couple of years, we've seen something very dramatic: essentially, a kind of a proxy war between Israel and Iran. And by and large, Israel has won that war. The Houthis are still around, but Hezbollah and Hamas have really been crushed. They'll probably survive because it's hard to pull up ... Like kudzu, there's some things that it's just hard to get rid of once and for all, but they've been seriously weakened. Iran has lost its control in Syria, its position in Iraq is weaker than it was.
(25:19):
And there were some, I think, both in the U.S. and in Israel who thought, "Wow, if we could beat Iran, then everything will be great." But what we're seeing now, for example, is that Saudi Arabia, which at one point was seriously considering normalization with Israel, is less interested now. And the reason, in a way, was what was driving the Saudis toward the Israelis was common fear of an opposition to Iran. And if that is less necessary now thanks to Israel, the Saudis have less reason to pay a sort of political price or any other price to normalize with Israel so that you solve one set of problems, and you don't totally solve them. Hamas is still there, Hezbollah is still there, Iran is still working on the bomb, et cetera, and it still hates you, but you deal with, at least temporarily, one set of problems, and another set of problems crops up. And so life in the Middle East, I think, is just going to be one thing after another.
(26:27):
So what we have to do and what the Israelis have to do is to intelligently align our policies to both the opportunities and the risks of this new era in Middle Eastern politics that's opening up.
Mitch Daniels (26:43):
You have argued persuasively to many of us that Israel just did what it had to do in Gaza and what it's continuing to do. Now here's in a case of the only democracy, authentic democracy in that entire part of the world deciding that its interests require it to act in a very brutally suppressive manner. I guess that's what we call realism in the world in which you're a thought leader.
Walter Russell Mead (27:17):
Well, I was actually born in South Carolina, and folks in the part of the country where I come from still remember this guy, General Sherman, and we remember that he burned down a lot of stuff. What I think we also remember is that was the end of the war essentially. Sherman said, "War is hell. And what you have to do is persuade the people you're fighting that war is hell and they need to stop." And so I think ... And if you look at American history in the last five months of World War II, American bombs on civilians in Japan killed more civilians than all American military casualties in all our wars going back to the revolution. One night in Tokyo-
Mitch Daniels (28:09):
Some German civilians too.
Walter Russell Mead (28:11):
Exactly. One night in Tokyo saw more civilian deaths than our total military casualties in Vietnam and Korea. So it's a little, I would say, if Israelis get annoyed at Americans now wringing our hands and trying to present ourselves as moral exemplars here, I can understand that feeling.
(28:37):
Now the other side of that though is, is the goal that you are pursuing attainable through the means that you are pursuing it? And I think the Israelis now are very much divided. What's been done up to now may be necessary, but what does that tell you about what needs to happen tomorrow? And the one thing we know in life is that going on eternally repeating the actions of even the recent past does not always produce the result that you want. So I think Israel is at a moment of really having to rethink, and it's a difficult set of problems. I wish them every success in finding a path, but they are at a very difficult juncture.
Mitch Daniels (29:31):
You recently taught the rest of us about or updated us on events in the continent of Africa. You said pretty definitively that the democracies collapsed all over that continent, that the U.S approach to aid has been a failure. And I think that by extension, Europe and other countries. Does it matter? Should we care? If so, what new policies might be an improvement on what's failed so manifestly?
Walter Russell Mead (30:08):
Well, I think we need to look at Africa as it is, not Africa as we would like it to be. And so if you read some of the media coverage about Africa really is, is democracy winning in Africa and so on and so forth? Actually, there is democracy in Africa, and I'm all for it, and I hope that it grows and succeeds. But I think the latest estimates are something like 10% or less of the population lives under democratic governments, and it's not going up.
(30:41):
If you want to understand the misguidedness of some of the West Africa policy, during some recent elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there were actually stories of helicopters airlifting paper ballots to remote villages for this vote. Now it's just, there were babies dying in those villages who had no medical care, and the helicopters weren't flying babies or doctors, and nobody really believes on the planet that actually that election was anything like what an election would look like in the Netherlands or Spain, with well-organized parties for a government that can actually do things. It was kind of just a pretense, a whole thing, a sort of Potemkin village.
(31:34):
We need to be thinking much more about the real problems and the real situation in Africa. Some USAID has actually been effective, like PEPFAR, in saving a lot of lives, and that's great. But I think the whole democracy promotion agenda in Africa is something that we need to put on a shelf for a while and start thinking, "Okay, all right, China is going after these rare earths and other minerals that are in Africa. How much does that affect our security, and what should we be doing?"
(32:16):
I look at what Russia has been doing through the Wagner Group in North Africa, and I think, "Gee, we say we are opposed to what the Russians are doing in Ukraine. Maybe what we should be doing in Africa is just making the Wagner group go away." I think the United States of America, and with our allies, could actually make mincemeat of Wagner's aspirations, and that would explain to Putin quite clearly, there is a price on your Ukraine policy, and that price is that everywhere around the world, everything you try to do is going to fail. So let's think about this, Mr. Putin. And now let's talk again about our political relationship.
(33:02):
So I think we have interest in Africa, but I think that the idea that what we're trying to do short term is to turn Africa into Western Europe is just delusional. And a lot of Americans who listen to some of this and have good hearts and good intentions about Africa, when they hear the sort of Africa lobby supporting ridiculous ideas, then they say, "Let's just get out of it completely. We don't trust the foreign aid community, we don't trust the Africa lobby community to come up with sensible policy, so let's just not do anything."
Mitch Daniels (33:48):
Well, thank you for that tour of the world, dazzling, and I don't know who else could have taken us on it. I am moved to remind you, you have, as far as I know, failed completely to write about Antarctica yet. So we'll await illumination on that score sometime soon.
(34:06):
But let's finish by talking about our continent, our nation, in fact, and the state of play and our prospects here. You're one of our great historians. There are many schools of historians who think in terms of cycles or think they identify patterns and repetitions in history. And many are with us now. Many are foreseeing, for different reasons, a major crisis coming to this country, a crisis of the kind that can either extinguish liberty or somehow revive it on the backside. Is a wrenching crisis likely in this country? And if so, what would cause it?
Walter Russell Mead (34:59):
Well, let me say first of all that I think we can talk about the crisis in our country without needing to gin up a whole set of historical cycles and stuff. I think we just benefit by looking at our current situation. And what I would say is that we are very much going through an economic transformation of our country as big as the Industrial Revolution, say after the Civil War when the railroads and you're building huge steel factories and really just changing the way the country works.
(35:39):
And people after the Civil War in the U.S., they didn't understand, I mean, even how do you keep clean water in a city of 5 million people where before that the United States had not had really big cities in the modern term. And now you've got Chicago going from a bunch of prairie flats to a major world city in the space of 30 years, I mean, how do you keep it from burning down, for example? Does Mrs. O'Leary really need to keep a cow in the middle of a wooden city? But how do you stop diseases? How do you educate millions of children whose parents come from outside the United States? What do you do about economic cycles and credit cycles that suddenly ...
(36:30):
In the old days when you had a problem, people would go back to the farm and live with their families until things stabilized. Well, no farms and not enough places on them, et cetera. So all of this stuff. And our institutions weren't set up to deal with this emerging reality, our ideas, our political parties. And so we went through 30 ... You think about it, from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to the assassination of William McKinley, the United States really didn't know where we were going. Can we think of a president in that era or a law or a senator in that era who had that clear vision?
(37:12):
Now afterwards, we began to adjust. And in the beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and going on, we started developing institutions and ideas for how to manage this new set of social conditions. We learned to use the resources that the Industrial Revolution created to address the problems that it cost. We are now at a similar point with the emergence of social media, AI, various other kinds of IT, they changed the way our country works. And most of our ideas were developed for that old industrial era. And so I think there is no way we avoid going through a period when, in a sense, our system of government, our political ideologies, and so on, fit uneasily on the reality of this horse that is galloping into the future. So that, I think, is clear.
(38:16):
And ultimately, I really am an optimist in that I believe that at the far side of this is greater abundance, greater individual freedom, greater individual opportunity. And I look back to that earlier period, by the time McKinley was assassinated, the United States had built the greatest economy in the world, even though our government flubbed almost every big question that it was asked to solve for 30 years. So I think it's always been the dynamism of American society rather than the smooth functioning of our institutions that has kept us on the path. And this, I see that's there as much or even more than ever. And that makes me ultimately optimistic, though it also makes me think we need to keep our seatbelt buckled for the next portion of the ride, bumpy air ahead.
Mitch Daniels (39:17):
I hope that's right. Far be it for me to argue history with the nation's experts. But our government has taken onto itself a lot of tasks in the days since McKinley was elected that could get in the way of the dynamism, which, I agree with you, was our magic formula for so very long.
(39:41):
Well, let me just ask you this penultimate question, I guess. Here are some threats to liberty that we've talked about or at least touched on here. Pick out the ones that should trouble us the most or rank them if all, if you will. How do you name six or seven? So China, Russia, war of some kind, whether it's with them or other wars have tended to empower nation states and all the rest. Domestic illiberalism either of the left or the right, AI as a potential super intelligence that might rather quickly decide that we're dispensable, or fiscal or fiscal collapse, economic collapse, all much being discussed these days. Which of those should we be most watchful about? Are there a couple on that list that don't bother you at all?
Walter Russell Mead (40:44):
All right. Yeah, I think probably not just war, but the approach to war. I think I would put it as number one because, God willing, we will not go into another major international conflict, but it already looks to me as if we are in the equivalent of a Cold War with China.
(41:06):
And so for example, on things like how fast do we proceed with AI and so on, it's not just up to us in terms of, "Oh, what would make me happiest about AI?" But if we don't develop it and China does, where does that leave us? So already to a certain extent, the international competition is taking some choices out of our hands, and that may exacerbate some of our other problems, but you have to attend to business. So I do see that as an immediate and severe threat.
(41:46):
I'm actually a little bit less worried about AI taking over everything in part because I don't want to say anything bad about Amazon here, but I use Amazon quite a bit for purchasing and so on, and I look at the books and the music that it recommends for me, and it's not that good, it's not that good. And I'm sure they invest a lot of money, and that's the kind of place where AI really gets deployed, and they're not that good at predicting my preferences or whatever. So I would say the gap between the almighty AI that we all worry about and what technology can do now is less.
(42:36):
I would say both in some ways domestically, the biggest danger and the biggest opportunity seem to me to be connected because let's talk about Medicare and Medicaid, which I think are the great drivers of our financial problems. That is, if the only thing we had to worry about was keeping social security solvent and these other programs were fine, we could keep social security solvent forever basically.
Mitch Daniels (43:04):
As somebody said, that's the easy one, ironically, but that's the easy one.
Walter Russell Mead (43:09):
It is. Right. And if you took out the others, you could fix it in a very painless way actually. And fundamentally, Medicare and Medicaid, I think we don't need to see them as problems of arithmetic but problems of service delivery. I ask myself, "What will healthcare likely look like in 50 years?" And I think it's actually going to look a little bit like this: less a human doctor who's been trained very expensively and so on; it's going to be a flight attendant with a smart box, in a sense, where most of the knowledge, overwhelming preponderance of the knowledge is going to be in the medical system--computers, AI generators, whatever. And the human part of the medical profession is going to be helping us understand what's happening and feel good about it, about what's happening, and comply with whatever it is that we need to do.
(44:11):
And that system is likely to be almost infinitely better because of the amount of knowledge and individualization that you can get with those technologies and much, much cheaper to operate because even a very good flight attendant doesn't need all the training and so on.
(44:30):
Now there will still be a handful of great human experts, and so on, in the system. Computers don't replace that. Now that system would be affordable. And so when we think about Medicare reform and so on, to try to get into an argument about how do we chop and chip here and there, you get a lot of political resistance to any kind of cuts. Can we think instead about how do we build what I call the infrastructure, not infrastructure but infrastructure, that can get us closer to that much better and cheaper healthcare system that would be affordable?
(45:17):
And I think if more of the reform discussion went into, "No, no, no, you can't have what you want because it's too expensive," and was much more, "Well, let's figure out a way that you can get even more than you now think you're entitled to, and we all pay less for it." I think that path is the better path. So I'd say whether we as a society are capable of moving in that direction matters hugely because I don't think you can solve the problem of the healthcare we need is going to keep going up and up and up, and our current system delivery, it'll simply become exponentially more expensive to provide it. And a democratic society is basically going to have a really hard time saying, "Is grandma going to get her cancer medication, or are we going to have a big budget deficit, or are we going to pay taxes that just completely choke off our economic and personal lives?" That discussion is a loser. We need to move to a different kind of discussion.
Mitch Daniels (46:30):
Well, I love and buy into the end state that you described. I think that the question will be whether we can get there nearly in time, whether there's a mismatch in time here and we go broke running the old system on our way long before we can provide the one you described.
Walter Russell Mead (46:51):
And so getting people who are good at looking for opportunities to begin reducing costs now, so that we want to bring that transition forward. There will still be questions about cuts and priorities and all of this, you can't wave a magic wand to make everything go away, but can you get people to a place where they feel that we have a path toward solving this. And it's a long path, but we're already moving in the right direction. I think if you can do that, the spirit in which the country looks at some of these problems starts to change, and that creates more opportunities for progress.
Mitch Daniels (47:36):
Well, Dr. Mead, with your typical pressions, you have anticipated the question I usually end these conversations with, which is, will we be more or less free in 2050? You've expressed optimism, and I certainly hope you're right. But for now, let me just thank you. You are, in my judgment, America's premier thought leader and both the best informed and most wide-ranging person on these questions that we've talked about. And please press on for the benefit of your faithful readers out here. Thank you very much for all the time and insight you've shared with us this morning. And thank you all for joining us on this latest Future of Liberty podcast. We'll be back with more. You'll see this one on stream very shortly. Thank you for joining us, and see you next time.
Outro (48:31):
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