Hugh Roome: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to PWC and we thank PWC for hosting another fine event from the Foreign Policy Association. This is the Mary Belknap Lecture Series and Norton Belknap, who preceded the current Secretary of State as CEO of the EXXON Corporation, is here representing this fine event which he's named in Mary Belknap's behalf. Mary was the chairman of the board of the Foreign Policy Association for some absolutely terrific years on the part of the organization.

We have here tonight a extremely provocative speaker, I must say, and I am excited to say that we're going to get answers to questions like, from Parag Khanna. Hmm, can't quite see ... "How to Run the World," and he'll focus on his new book, an important treatise on connectivity. This is a man who has studied governments and technology trends around the world for many years and has made a provocative contribution to ideas about how the world will finish in this century.

If some of us think of the 20th century as the American century, I think Mr. Khanna has looked at the possibility that the 21st century will be either the Asian century or the Latin American century in one of your articles. I think that we have someone who is quite learned, coming from Georgetown, and then with a doctorate, London School of Economics, but someone who's been willing to comment on things like future of government, how the Trump government relates to current trends in the world.

What connectivity means, and the basis for thinking in terms of maps and graphics, as we try to understand these profound concepts. I have to say that Mr. Khanna's work has met with all kinds of response, from great accolades to some bitter fights, and I think, as someone who is willing to create and talk about big ideas that affect us all, we're very lucky to have him here this evening. So, without further ado, Parag.

Parag Khanna: Thank you. Good evening. Thanks so much, Hugh, for that very colorful introduction. Thank you, Noel. It's great to be back at the Foreign Policy Association. I want to thank yourselves and PWC for hosting and the Belknap family for sponsoring this series. It's really a privilege to be here with all of you.

It's been about one year since "Connectography" came out, so I've heard lots of questions, lots of comments, lots of feedback. The challenge, the onus, is on you tonight to ask me a question I haven't heard before and in order to proceed with haste in that direction, I'm going to kind of blitz through, if you will, some of the formalities of the presentation and show you really just a slice of some of the maps, some of the arguments, some of the data that I use to present the case around why connectivity has become a true foundation of the sort of new global order and hopefully we'll get some provocative dialog going in all of that.

Let me begin with what I call the "Global Connectivity Revolution" and this is the sort of realization that if you start to map out the major infrastructures ... You know, when you use the word connectivity, you say connectivity to a child, what do they think? Chances are they pull out a mobile phone, except it's not attached to anything. It's wireless, so they don't see connectivity.

The truth is that most of our interactions, whether it is when we're traveling, visiting a place, going on business, exchanging data, sending emails, making financial transactions, the world of trade and commerce and interactions all rests on some infrastructure or the other, or many infrastructures, and we don't appreciate those thing because we don't map them.

One of the exercises involved in the production of this book was to literally make physical maps of the world's connectivity, and what is connectivity but this set of infrastructures in the area of transportation, energy and communications? So for example, this is a map that shows you the location of all of the world's highways and railways, oil and gas pipelines, electricity grids, fiber optic submarine internet cables, all on one map.

Now, unfortunately, you don't have this map. You don't have it in you classrooms, you don't have it in your offices. You have political maps. Your worldview is so often governed by a map like this: political geography. It's so often presumed that the map of political geography, the location of the states and the borders between them is the defining paradigm of how human civilization is organized.

We are born into a country, we are defined by that country, that national identity is our primary identity, but if you really take the longest possible view of human history, 60,000 years since mankind began wandering out of Africa and inhabiting all of the continents, that isn't really the common denominator of human history, that we live in bordered, ethnonationalistic political states. That's actually a relatively short period of recent history.

It's a far more common denominator, if you will, that we do inhabit the same planet, we don't need to argue about natural geography and how important it is. I don't dispute the depictions on a traditional globe, right? We agree that blue represents the oceans, brown represents the deserts, and green represents the forests.

Here we have a lot of contestation. Political geography, right? We fight over borders. This map itself is always changing. One of the ironies that I find in our weddedness to political geography is the foundation of human order and human organization, is the fact that there is nothing rigid or static about this map at all.

We're constantly fighting over it and the fact that we're always fighting over it and disputing those lines is itself evidence that it's not necessarily either the number or the nature of those lines that defines who we are. What both of

these sets of maps, though, is missing is functional geography, a third kind of geography. Functional geography is all of the infrastructures that we have built.

Now, it could be that the volume of such infrastructure a century ago or two centuries ago didn't merit making such exclusive maps around the world of connectivity, in the way that you may not have needed a world road atlas 150-200 years ago because we didn't have automobiles and you couldn't take trains and drive around the world, and you couldn't fly around the world.

But in the last particularly 75 years or so, the volume of infrastructure investment has become so massive, beginning in the United States a century ago, Europe after World War II, the Asian economies in the last quarter century and beyond. Adding it all together, the total mileage or kilometers of the world's pipelines, roads, highways, railways, internet cables, is 150 times longer than all the borders in the world put together. And yet, we don't tend to map it.

My argument is not that functional geography is superior to political geography or that either of these is superior to natural geography. My argument is that, if we appreciate that the world is rather complex and getting more complex, one of the driving reasons for that is that it is more connected, that there are more interactions, more feedback loops, and those feedback loops produce complexity. So, if we want to understand why things are the way they are today, why do we feel that events are accelerating, that technological forces, market forces and political forces are colliding in such uncertain, unpredictable ways?

At a minimum, you should be creating maps that layer these forces or these trends on top of each other, and then you would get a more accurate representation of how we are interacting because this map, for sure, does not tell you enough about how the world works. Simply looking at maps of African states or Latin states and believing that we are all actually equal to each other in a sovereign, legal way and that we have to interact in that way, and not even mapping the demographics of where people are and the economic size of these entities.

We have the data visualization tools to map all of those things and those will give us a much better understanding of power dynamics and relationships, and the flows of goods, services, people, data, and capital and so forth, that really help us organize our daily lives. I've actually been leading a couple of cartographic exercises that help us do that.

This one is developed by the Harvard Center for Geographical Analysis, and what I've been doing with them is taking ... you can see a lot of the maps in the book. We've taken that data and we've projected it now onto a digital platform, and you can toggle around the world, you can look at all of the world's airports, you can look at all of the world's oil and gas reserves, you can

look at all of the pipelines, or you can switch them on and off, depending on what you want to see.

You can even see prospective projects, things that are planned but haven't yet been built or developed, so it's even a way to look at scenarios. What it tells you, of course, is what places in the world are connected and what places in the world are not connected from each other.

I've spoken a bit about how this is really in the last 75 years that this global connectivity revolution has been underway and accelerated. Now I want to focus for just a second on the last 25 years, if you will, because all of us ... I suppose there are a couple of college students here who may not have that much familiarity with the Cold War, but unfortunately, many or most of us have some historical memory and I would challenge anyone to think of a period in history where in 25 years so much has indeed changed.

Now, it's a cliché, of course. We live in changing times and so forth, and then a lot of people in technology circles debate about whether, in fact, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the technological revolutions of that time were even more profound than what we are experiencing today. I want to put that to the side because what I'm talking about it not just technological trends in 25 years, I'm talking about a whole set of changes in, again, our governance, in technology, in geopolitics, all happening at that same time.

It's the end of the Cold War. There's a photo from the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Expansion of capital markets, privatization of economies, this infrastructure build out, the communications revolution which, of course, begins the same year as the Berlin Wall fell in the sense that the worldwide web was created in 1989, and what that all adds up to is a massive acceleration of globalization.

So, right now, at exactly this moment, we're having a serious debate about whether or not globalization is moving forward or backward or retrenching. I wear this on my sleeve and fortunately, I have the numbers on my side, not those who are so-called anti-globalists, but globalization is not really not in any trouble. I'm not remotely concerned about it.

I'm certainly concerned about the methodologies and the intellects, to be perfectly blunt, of those people who are anti-globalists. They have a lot to learn about how the world really works and I've written this book to some extent to educate them because globalization is not at risk of falling apart, or reversing, or retrenching, and I'm going to bludgeon you in the next 20, 30 minutes with more and more evidence of that.

I actually believe that we live in a world of what is becoming increasingly total globalization, where the infrastructural forces, the technological forces, and even economic forces as well, because it's not really all about whether Trump is going to have border adjustment taxes and protectionism, that's not really

going to be the decisive factor here, is really going to drive more and more inter-human connectivity, inter-societal connectivity, international connectivity, and therefore globalization will be alive and well.

So much so that we are experiencing what in political science we'd call "systems change." I know that you've had many, many, many speakers in recent years stand up here and talk about the shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world. Raise your hand if you have been hearing lectures on that, right? When people say, "Well, I think China now is a super power, and India's becoming a great power, and Russia's really reasserting itself, and we live in a multipolar world."

I don't think anyone really debates that anymore. That's what's called structural change, right? When you have the same kind of system, right? You've got states in Iraq. The question is just how many of them are really powerful. That's child's play. What this book is about is what's called systems change.

Systems change doesn't happen just every couple of decades as some country gets powerful. Systems change happens every several hundred years. Systems change is when you change the nature of the units in the system and the way in which they interact with each other, and that's very, very profound. Systems change is what happened when we moved from a medieval world of high fragmentation, of empires, of city states, of mercenary armies, of religious movements, all operating in a very confused, multi-dimensional, multi-layered way, towards this so-called modern world, this Westphalian system of sovereign states interacting with each other.

And now we are graduating from that state-centric, Westphalian world into this what many people call a supply chain world in which, because there is such an intense amount of connectivity, states and borders don't necessarily define how we interact with each other around the world, but rather supply chains do. Value chains do, because the supply of anything can meet the demand for anything.

There are still borders along the way, but borders aren't rigid containers. Borders are frictions. They're a kind of friction. Borders can be strong, borders can be weak. They don't mean the same thing in the same place at the same time. Not at all. Never. So the supply chain is a more important organizing principle for the world and the world can be reorganized according to what supply chains you belong to, what value chains you're connected to, what sectors of the economy you work in.

If you work in finance, you may have more in common with other people in finance in other cities in rich and poor countries around the world than you do with your next door neighbor. Today, we talk about that phenomena a lot. We just refer to it as inequality, right? But it has an underpinning that relates to what your role is in global value chains and a country can identify where it is in

global value chains. A person can identify where they are in global value chains.

But the supply chin organizes all of it. The supply chain is a force even more powerful than states themselves, as states seek to be part of those supply chains, and if they're not the supply chain bypasses them and moves towards more competitive states, more capable populations, more technologically connected societies.

So I think of the supply chain as something really deeper. Now, states have played the most pivotal role in bringing us towards the supply chain world. States create globalization. Empires create globalization through their expansion, right? There isn't a dichotomy or discrepancy between the two, but by creating globalization, empires and states have also created something greater than any one of them.

No one country, no one power, no one company can shut down globalization, can shut down supply chains. In a lot of my research, I've found that whenever a country sort of tries to stop something, stop the flow of something, it just flows around them. We're seeing that happen right now with trade, for example.

The United States was one of the architects of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement and in fact, part of how it was sold to Congress, although it failed to sell at all, was that it would help to contain China, or to really contain China's influence amongst Asian economies who would join TPP but China would not.

So, then along came Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and they said, "Well, we don't want TPP. We don't like TPP, we're going to pull out of TPP," and that was one of Trump's first executive orders. Does that mean that trade stopped? Does that mean that global trade has ground to a halt?

Well, no, because in fact all of the other TPP member countries got together two weeks ago in Chile and they said, "Let's move forward somehow with TPP," and in fact, China decided to go to that meeting because we weren't at that meeting. So, a trade agreement that we had sort of conjured up to help to isolate China winds up going on without us and with China.

That's just one of many, many examples of how flows don't stop. Trade doesn't stop. Globalization doesn't stop. It's something far greater than even America.

One of the key drivers of this is urbanization. The world population has become more than 50% urban, most of us live in cities. There is a set of about 40-50 mega-cities, if you will, the key demographic, key economic hubs in the world, and every one of these cities depends so much on connectivity. They can't imagine not being able to import food, fuel, water, talent, money, having

their stock exchanges connect to each other, being part of a global value chain.

All of the billions of people who live in particularly these major cities in the world intuitively want connectivity. Their municipal authorities want connectivity, their governments realize that even though they have populist temptations coming from non-connected portions of their population, their urban populations really require global connectivity.

Now, this is New York City, one of the world's largest urban agglomerations and economies. Could you, could anyone ... I don't know what the GDP of New York City is. I'm guessing it's let's say a couple of hundred billion dollars, maybe? Two or three hundred billion. Yeah, actually, if the New York City is about 10% of America GDP, that would make it about two hundred billion dollars or so, roughly. So let's just say.

Can someone of New York City is that doesn't depend in some way, shape or form on international connectivity? Could you even try and disentangle it? It might have been easier in a previous era, right? But today it's really, really hard. If you can isolate financial services, but how much of the liquidity, how much of the capital in our capital markets is foreign versus domestic? And all of these kinds of things.

How much of the economy depends on occupancy in hotel rooms and how many of those hotel rooms are occupied by people from abroad? Look at the real estate boom and the high end housing market in New York. How much of that is being bought by foreign investors? Lots and lots of it. Very, very hard to disentangle the foreign and the domestic, but what we all intuitively know as New Yorkers, that New York is better off being connected than not being connected. The people who live in the cities of the world sort of think that way.

I'm going to jump ahead a little bit to the geopolitical point. I'll come back to that. I mentioned TPP as one example of connectivity moving on no matter what we do. I talked also a bit about the last 25 years of history and where that's brought us. Let's talk about the next 25 years, because I think that the biggest geopolitical story of the next 25 years has nothing to do with Donald Trump. It has nothing to do with the Trans Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement. It has nothing to do with ISIS.

It has to do with the unification of the Eurasian megacontinent. A lot of kids ... Okay, raise your hands if when you were in Geography class in fourth grade, you were told that the continents of the world are North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, right? You were taught that Europe and Asia are different continents? Right, okay. Bad, bad teacher.

Europe and Asia are not different continents, there's one super giant mega-landmass called Eurasia. It has most of the world's population living on it. It is

one geological feature. It has many different cultural zones; Europe is one of them, Southeast Asia's one of them, South Asia's one of them, but they are not different continents.

The biggest story of the 21st Century is that due to the power of connective infrastructure, this megacontinent is really growing together into a functional commercial, economic, and strategic zone. It's not becoming one big super alliance that's going to rival North America; it's going to have plenty of conflicts and disputes, and inequalities and so forth on it, but it is integrating in a way that is really changing the power balance in the world.

Now we talked about Asia rising as if it just happens to have happened, right? It has drivers, and the driver of that is in fact connectivity. The origins of China's rise, which is by no means inevitable historically, has a lot to do with China opening up its economy in the late 1970s, attracting foreign investment, becoming the world's factory floor, becoming the anchor for the world's manufacturing supply chains, building up trade surpluses, amassing currency reserves.

Exporting now those surpluses and those reserves across the world into the American economy, into the European economy, into real estate markets around the world to buy up commodities in Africa and in Latin America, and now to build these infrastructures, to subsidize trillions of dollars worth of highways, railways, pipelines, internet cables, hydrological canals, you name it. They're all on this map.

What I did to produce this map, which is in the middle of the book, is to basically go to all the countries that you see here, including Iran. I've spent lots of time over the years in Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, and Pakistan, Afghanistan, all of them. My nickname is Parag-astan for a reason.

I spent a lot of time in these countries, and I asked them, formerly I asked them, "As you increasingly participate in this so-called One Belt, One Road initiative of China's and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank," of which these countries have become members, "what are the specific projects where you would like to see greater infrastructure finance?" All of that is fancy way of my asking more colloquially, "What do you want China to build for you?"

This is the map that emerged, and these are the very concrete, very tangible ... infrastructure is a serious physical thing; connectivity is a real physical thing. This is what the functional map of the Eurasian landmass is going to come to look like in the next 25 years. I want to show you some data here.

As we have more international, inter-regional connectivity, trade patterns begin to shift because again, the cost of trade goes down very substantially. It has been an article of faith ... in fact, wait. Before you read it, I almost want to hide it from you guys. I want to ask you guys ... this is the TPP slides, so this is boring because we already talked about it.

Let me ask you: what is the volume of trade between the United States and the European Union every year? It's the largest trade axis in the world, we're always told. This is one of the pillar, this is one of the bedrocks of the transatlantic relationship, is trade; not just culture, values, history, alliances, but also economics. One: how much is it? Annual bilateral trade in goods and services between the United States and the European Union?

It's about a trillion dollars, right. Just under 1.1 trillion dollars a year. That's a lot, a lot of trade. No wonder we're so close to the Europeans, even though it doesn't feel like it right now. Things are a bit prickly at the moment. Part of the reason for that is in fact, if you do some simple arithmetic, you will find that today, European trade with China, plus European trade with India, plus European trade with Australia, South Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, is more than 1.1 trillion dollars. It's a fair bit more.

That is going to continue to grow, and grow, and grow, and this is the bullet point here. It's already about the same as US-European trade, but let's go back to this map, because you already have more than a trillion dollars of trade between the western half and the eastern half of Eurasia before all of these infrastructures have made it really, really easy to conduct that trade, and before the sides of Eurasia even have free trade agreements with each other.

So now let me ask you, let's say it's the year 2025, 2030. What's the volume of Europe-Asia trade going to be? Maybe two trillion, two and a half trillion, maybe three trillion dollars, right? It's going to be absolutely staggering. What will transatlantic trade be 8, 9, 10 years from now? It may be kind of stuck where it is, right?

What's Europe thinking in all of this? Are they listening to our treasury secretary who goes to the G20, who goes to Germany and says, "You really need to reduce your trade surpluses, you really need to consume more." Or are they thinking, "Actually, there's some fast growing markets out here that really want to absorb all the stuff we produce, and we're going to start to reorient ourselves in terms of trade towards Asia."

Now they're no dummies, they understand economics a lot better apparently, than anyone in our government and I'm sad to say that, but it's true because the Europeans when the Obama administration called ... when the Obama administration didn't want our European allies to join the AIIB bank, they called up all of them. Called up Britain, called up France, called up Germany, said, "Please don't join this Chinese bank. You know, it's going to undermine the World Bank, it's going to have weak standards of labor and environmental standards, and project finance, and all these other things."

And they said, "Sure, sure, Mr. Obama. Thanks for the call." And then they pick up the phone, and they call up Xi Jinping, and they say, "Where do we join? When do we sign up?" And so in exactly a month and a half in Beijing, there's

going to be a One Belt, One Road summit; it won't be the first one, but it will be the biggest one. 85 countries are going to show up, every one of our allies has joined the AIB; half the countries in the world it seems, have joined the AIB. Why?

Because like Germany, like Switzerland, like Italy, Spain, and France, and Britain, they see the opportunity in trillions of dollars of infrastructure finance. Now part of the reason they see it more intuitively than we see, and why we so terribly botched the launch of the Chinese AIB in our foreign policy is because these countries all think in terms of how they can get these construction contracts, how can they can be part of infrastructure development; because if you make a list of the top 25, top 30 largest engineering and construction companies in the world, all of them except for just two are European and Asian.

We make our foreign policy with our military industrial complex, they make their foreign policy with their engineering industrial complex. We have two of the top 25 EPC companies in the world, Bechtel and Fluor. All the rest come from this part of the world, and all of them think about how more connectivity is better, more connectivity creates jobs, creates exports, it enhances the trade opportunities across this landmass where, just to repeat myself, the vast majority of the world population lives.

I think therefore this is the biggest geopolitical story of the 21st Century, and it's just really getting underway. All of the countries on this map are going to be quite substantially transformed. This map is full of post colonial countries that are small, poor, weak, overpopulated with very bad infrastructure that they haven't renovated or renewed since the colonial era. Or, post Soviet republics that are truly in tatters and broken.

All of them need that Chinese finance, all of them need that Chinese infrastructure. They may be very resentful of China, they may be very concerned about the fact that China dominates their trade balance, and China dominates their foreign investment, but they're also sort of stuck in that situation. Just because it is a worrying fact, it doesn't mean it isn't a fact.

Whatever backlash one sees, and I see plenty of it, and the book is full of examples of it, and I go, and I observe these things firsthand, there is a lot of tension and fear of China in all of the countries that surround China. China has 14 neighbors, more than any country in the world, but that said, most of those countries are not able to find on the global market some willing substitute for their economic and infrastructural requirements because China is the world's largest sort of subsidizer and builder of infrastructure.

Just like we're the largest security provider, they're the largest infrastructure provider. One of the things I try to point out in the book is if you look at the world from the point of view of all of these countries, not just from Washington or New York, you'd appreciate that even though we think security

is by far the most important global public good, well, actually other people also think infrastructure is really, really important too.

I actually realize that we have realized as a country that infrastructure matters for us as well, it happens to be the only thing I think that Trump and Hillary agreed on during the election, was the sorry state of our infrastructure. I'm going to jump ahead to a couple of points because I can bounce back as we need to, because I had a lot more slides.

What I see is a world where as every region gets more and more connected to every other region, we move away from notions of hierarchy; the world must be organized according to one superpower, and there is some magical baton pass from Britain to the United States, the United States to China, and that baton pass can either be violent and war, or it can be peaceful. That's this utterly oversimplified model of the evolution of geopolitics that I'm sure you've unfortunately been told many, many times, and it's wrong, because that's not the way history works. It doesn't have to follow that model at all, just because it may or may not have happened so neatly in the last of hundred years.

What I see happening is the world being thoroughly, thoroughly distributed, because we live in a world now where every single region matters. Let's say you're the head of strategy, or a CEO of a multinational company. You now ask, "What is our Latin America strategy? What is our Africa strategy?" Every continent matters to you, and every continent matters to every other continent. I can show you again the very precise trade statistic that show you exactly how every region is connecting more to every other region, not less. Not de-globalizing, hyper globalizing.

If you look at the trade volumes between any two regions of the world, say Asia and Africa, it's gone up by 1,800% in a decade, and now it exceeds American trade with Africa by far. It's in fact catching up with the European trade with Africa, even though they're so close to each other. Every region is getting more connected to other regions, and that leads to a situation where no one power sits at the center, but every region matters.

And within every region, you have anchor powers, if you will. Of course the United States is the most powerful player in North America, for example, and Brazil in South America, and so forth. I think this is actually a good situation. I think that even though it's not as neat and tidy as saying, "America remains and persists the sole unipolar power in the system." I mean, that would be neat, tidy, and wrong.

I think instead you get this distributed model where connectivity is the sort of governing force, and no one power can stop others from dealing with each other. Just look at Europe and Asia, for example. Look at Asia and Africa. Is America stopping it? Could it stop it? Should it want to stop it? Probably not, because in fact as those economies grow, those become very important export

markets for the United States itself.

Just remember, if Apple ever starts selling a lot of iPhones in Africa, it's because African economies were growing because they were selling commodities to China, right? They didn't just mature and modernize overnight. We are in fact already benefiting from this world of very, very rapid connectivity. Whereas a lot of people talk about this Thucydides Trap, which is this again notion that when a rising power contends for top dog status with an incumbent power, there must be conflict.

What I view instead is a world of this distributed regionalism, in which the principle of reciprocity, right? So mutual benefit through these supply chain connections really governs who decides to relate to whom, and how. I think that that actually leads to a new way of thinking about how geopolitics evolves. We tend to think of it again in grand strategy terms; in terms of how does America maintain primacy? The presumption is that America must maintain primacy.

I look at things in a more mutual or global prism. I call it global strategic thought, in which we use this term Henry Kissinger started to use in his book about China, "co-evolution." It's not just the US and China that coevolve, it's really all the regions of the world that coevolve. They find useful the complementarities with others, and they try to navigate their way in that system, and hopefully minimize conflict because just to show you, just a final couple of points here, what's been happening in this world of radical, physical connectivity expansion is that we've created a system that's actually rather resilient.

Now that is not a word that springs to mind a lot these days when we think about just how vulnerable we are, and susceptible we are to political shocks and disruptions, but on a global basis what we're seeing happen is that if you take, for example, energy markets, right? 10 years ago we lived in fear that if there is a disruption in flows of oil and gas through any major maritime choke point like the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, or the Strait of Malacca, those are the three dots there, then oil prices would spike, there could be war.

And in fact, many people have long predicted that the next global conflict would be the United States fighting with China over, for example, energy supplies in the Middle East. But instead, in this world of connectivity, what's happened is that if you have a supply disruption in one part of the world, you can use these infrastructures to get around it.

Goods can be shipped across the One Belt, One Road corridor. Arctic shipping has opened up. And instead of fighting with China over oil, we now sell oil to China, and that only began less than one year ago. Less than one year ago was the first time that an oil tanker set sail from Louisiana, went through the Gulf of Mexico, through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific Ocean to China.

Whereas yes, all sorts of war gaming, and white papers, and conflict scenarios were built around the idea that we'll fight over energy with China, and instead we just sell it to China. The forecast that the International Energy Agency has around American exports to China that they're actually going to double in the first couple of years, and keep on growing, and growing, and growing.

China doesn't view us as energy threat, China views us as energy supplier. And the more you marketize resources, the more you allow supply to meet demand, the more you can have a system where you have this resilience where supply can meet demand, where you don't have to fight over specific choke points, or specific resources because they're able to connect worldwide.

I foresee a lot of conflict scenarios over connectivity. When I look at what's happening with Russia and Ukraine, I don't see a 19th Century style land grab over Eastern Ukraine, which is not really all that lucrative territory. I see a tension over a control over the infrastructures like the gas pipelines, and the value of that asset.

Similarly in Eurasia, as China builds all of these infrastructures across Central Asia, it's not colonizing those countries, it's not invading those countries, but it's going to have a lot of tensions with them over who controls and who owns those physical infrastructural assets. That's what we call extended sovereignty; China's not exerting sovereignty over Kyrgyzstan, or Kazakhstan, but it owns those infrastructural assets, those pipelines and other things across foreign territory.

It's a much more complicated way, a complex way of viewing geopolitics than simply saying, "I'm going to invade your country," because it could be a very long time before you actually witnessed China or other powers actually conduct the kinds of significant military incursions in a foreign territory that risks World War III. And while we're sitting here waiting for that event, and believing that nothing is geopolitics until that happens, the truth is geopolitics is happening all the time.

It's the competition over these infrastructures and the value of those infrastructures that is intensely geopolitical. So there are conflict scenarios around the infrastructure, and there's peaceful scenarios around the infrastructure. I see them playing out in multiple ways, but in the long run I have a cautiously optimistic view because of the fact that even if we build these infrastructures and connectivity for selfish reasons, they wind up creating a much more and distributed system where supply can meet demand, and where there's less reason for conflict.

With that, I want to just move on to our discussion. I hope you have lots of questions, including some that I have never heard before, thank you very much. Thank you. We had a hand just shoot up right there in the back, the gentleman with the tie?

Speaker 3: I'm trying to reconcile the connectivity on trade with ... Henry Kissinger talks about how there won't be a world order, there's never been such a thing as a world order, because you have all these different sources of legitimacy for all these different forms of government. They can gain power, but to retain their power, they have to have legitimacy, and they all seem to have different models for their legitimacy.

He points to, let's say China has a pact with the people where if they improve their standard of living, then you know, you're going to support the government. United States, we believe in individual liberty, and independent judicial system. That's a little bit different. Maybe in some of the Islamic countries, if you believe in Allah, then that's your source of power.

You do have these different sources of legitimacy across the globe. If I take politics out of the equation, then maybe the dots all connect, but it seems at some point we have to govern this trade, someone's got to have power to govern that trade, and you have different legitimacy for that power. How do you reconcile those political developments with these sort of trade developments?

Parag Khanna: That's a great question, but I think there's a lot going on in what you're saying. There's a difference between domestic sources of legitimacy and international agreements that govern international interactions like commerce. You can have very diverse regime types such as we have today, all trading with each other under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, or bilateral inter-regional free trade agreements.

That's the world as it is right now. That's not illegitimate just because China's not democratic, and we're democratic, right? The system is legitimate because it's a mutually recognized and legally codified system of trade, so there's nothing wrong with that.

When he's talking about the legitimacy of the international system, the point there is ... Well, there is such a thing as world order, right? World order is strictly defined in geopolitics as a stable distribution of power in the system. It doesn't itself have to be legitimate or illegitimate; world order is a static measurable fact.

We have a world order today. We have a world order in which the United States has a lot of political, military and economic power, Europe has a lot, China has a lot, and others have less. That is the order of the world. Whether or not that order is legitimate is a diplomatic and legal sort of question, and maybe some countries or some powers in the system view it as legitimate as it is, and others don't.

We don't have the right per say, or no one power gets to determine whether the whole system itself is legitimate. It's legitimate if it exists, so to speak, because there is no one supernatural authority in the world. Even if the UN

disappeared tomorrow, we would still have a world order.

We would still have this distribution of power, and we would still have certain rules, codes, and practices especially around trade, which is sort of the primary way in which we interact with each other that would actually carry on and persist simply because of the common agreements that we have under the WTO.

Quite frankly, in the other books I've written more about this, but the WTO is by far the world's most powerful intergovernmental organization, way more so than some of the ones that we pay attention to, like the Security Council and so forth. The WTO has coercive powers that no other body actually has, and we don't study that nearly enough. It's actually a lot smaller with a smaller bureaucracy and costs less to run than many others, but it's actually done a whole lot of good.

I think that there's a lot of nuances in your question, but suffice it to say that no one gets to decide whether the world order is legitimate or illegitimate for everyone else. You only get to have your own national view of it. ... Yes, indeed you are.

Speaker 4: Yeah, you've been talking about functional geography, and I'm wondering what are the elements which foster non-functional geography, and in particular, I'm thinking of the things like automation, which are now causing so many jobs to disappear and one would think that that's making everything unstable all around the world as it increases inequality. I'm just wondering what fosters non-functional geography.

Parag Khanna: It's a great question. Labor automation affects some sectors more than others, and some countries more than others. I don't necessarily view it as, even though it's something that has global applicability. I mean, industrial robots are a massive investment in Japan, China has more of them than anyone else, they're certainly displacing more jobs in America than outsourcing is.

It is a global factor, but that doesn't meant it's universally so. The responses that countries have to it are highly differential. Some countries have actually invested in retraining and up scaling their workers, and moving them into higher value added segments of the value chain, like Germany, or Switzerland, or South Korea. Others have not, such as the United States.

And in countries where you don't have that, not surprisingly, you have mismatches in the labor force, you have obviously a lot of ill-will against the political elite that hasn't catered to their needs, and you have phenomena like populism. You can almost trace a direct line from not having these kinds of worker retraining programs to having political populism.

Populism itself doesn't cure labor automation, populism itself doesn't implement skill building programs, right? Smart governments do, and

populism is often the exact opposite of smart governments. That's why populist governments barely last a year just about anywhere in the world.

I think that just because you have resentment, and that resentment is very justified, and that resentment leads to populist upheavals, it still doesn't mean that you've solved the problem, it just means that you're angry. As much as I have a lot of sympathy for those movements around the world today, I'm more focused in what we can learn from the governments that don't have that problem, that don't have those movements, because they did really smart tangible, social, and physical policy things, and we spend so much time talking about how angry we are, and so little time doing the things that other countries did to avoid our situation.

Believe me, all you have to do is stop watching the news for one hour, and start reading and observing what's happening in those smarter countries, because they are quite frankly smarter. You know, we generate all the best stuff but as a society, we're not smarter. We have pockets of innovation that beat everyone else, but we're a really, really big country.

All of these gains and innovations, and things that we could do right have to be scaled across 300 million people. The challenge is harder for us to take these great ideas and execute them, and we're obviously not doing that very well at all.

Lady in the ... yeah, that's great. I have one. Oh, yeah. I should've put that one up there but as you see, I had way more than we had time for, but one of the most provocative maps in the book is one that I worked with a British scientific organization to develop, and it plots out where they see global agricultural production in the year 2040 or so if temperatures continue to rise, and if desertification basically wipes out a lot of the arable land in today's largest food producers, like Brazil, like the United States, Australia, India, China.

What their map shows, and it's really frightening, is that most of the world food will be grown in Canada and Russia. They are the two largest countries in the world, but they're also very highly depopulated societies. Where will we need to be, or where will we need to mechanize agriculture in the coming decades if we don't reverse this trend of global warming is a pretty frightening scenario. In the book, I talk through the legal, the moral, the demographic, and migratory consequences of that world.

And then, the second big part that you raised there is rising sea levels, because the world population is concentrating in the Pacific rim, Asian coastal cities that have a combined billions of people, which are, because they're in the tropical equatorial latitudes, by far the most vulnerable to sea level rising.

Mankind is very wisely, I use that term very sarcastically, concentrating in the areas that are going to get sunk, and we haven't really thought about the resilient strategies around that, but I do foresee the need for very significant,

redundant infrastructures inland; people having to move inland into areas where they hadn't settled before, and even that doesn't solve the food problem either.

Huge importance again. Why did I show this juxtaposition of natural, political, and functional geography? How much does that political geography really matter when your coastal cities have sunk and the five largest food producers in the world aren't producing food? How much loyalty is there going to be to that political map? How much is sovereignty going to matter?

You need the natural geography map because that too is changing, in order to understand how the politics is going to play out and how we can use our functional connectivity to try to save ourselves in that situation. The gentleman on the left there?

Speaker 5: I really enjoyed the lecture because I happen to be a physician with a lot of interest in neurosciences and neuro development, and it looks like it has a life on its own, almost, as you depicted it like pretty much the way our nervous system functions.

The only problem that I see that our brain is still much more superior to this. We have several hundreds of trillions of neuron synapses in our brains, and each time when an impulse comes in, a sort of a default line hits the cognitive system, and the problem is that to change this and accommodate something new is very difficult sometimes.

If somebody believed that killing other people is good, that habit in the brain is very hard to change. How do you say that reconciliation between our dysfunctional brain in this respect, and this very rapidly growing and overpowering system that has a life on its own and eventually, at least in some groups, we'll have a tremendous conflict which may resolve some violence.

Parag Khanna: Well, clearly our politics today is a great example of not being caught up or being in sync with this reality of connectivity, and the benefits and the costs, or even understanding the actual distribution of benefits of cost; of the system that we have ourselves built. It's a learning process that is not going to proceed at the same pace around the world.

As I said, people who live in globally connected cities and global hubs are going to have a better understanding or intuitive appreciation of this. Their brain is going to be more adapted and able to grasp this reality from other people, so I think your question is absolutely right.

At the same time, we do have evidence from various surveys that are done of, say, millennials all over the world, that there's a certain set of values that they are increasingly identifying with, whether they come from north, south, east, west, rich countries, poor countries; things like the right to connectivity, the right to mobility, the importance of sustainability. That is showing up more

and more as part of people's set of ethical priorities for how they wish to see their countries, or the international system govern.

So, there's a tentative learning going on that we see is particularly prominent among young people, but it's not to say that ... well, okay, around the world at the same time, you're going to have some millennial geopolitical revolution and everyone's going to govern the world better. We're obviously not in that situation either.

I wish there were a universal answer to your question, but there isn't, but yet there's still some hope based on how we see values shifting. I think we have time for actually only one more question. Sir?

Speaker 6: Yeah. In terms of possible future conflicts, what is your forecast over the next 25 years for North Korea?

Parag Khanna: Well, I mean, I don't have to forecast North Korea for the next 25 years because I don't think we'll have North Korea in its present form more than 5 years from now. I have a chapter on North Korea in the book, based on the trip that I took there a couple of years ago.

There's very bifurcated conversation about the country. On the one hand it's war is imminent, because they're testing ever more sophisticated rocketry. On the other hand, you'll read about how they're trying desperately to create some form of a legitimate economy, and to attract investment, and special economic zones, and that kind of thing. They're allowing mobile phones now, and so on and so forth.

Both of those things blow hot and blow cold. Sometimes they're testing and launching missiles towards Japan, then they don't do that for a while, or testing nukes, or not. Sometimes they're trying to open their economy, and other times they're closing everything off. It's hard. Sometimes they're assassinate siblings all over the world, and other times they're not, right?

It's not exactly a place that's highly predictable, but it's certainly not either as irrational as a lot of people portray it as being. What they do is attention-seeking behavior, and I think that we give them too much attention. Now in any other context, one would give attention to such provocative measures, right? It's not insignificant when they test a nuclear bomb, or when they launch a missile towards Japan.

I'm not saying, "Blow it off." What I am saying though, is that by hyping it up and putting it on the front page every day and declaring in big news alerts that "North Korea is the biggest threat to the world," they then take that and feed it back in their own system and say, "See? Look. The world is out to get us," and then nothing ever changes.

I do think that there is such a risk obviously, to escalation that even they

realize that any kind of mutual or bilateral kind of conflict is the end of their existence. Eventually, I imagine ... again, based on what I've actually seen on the ground in terms of the foreign role of Russia, China, and even South Korea in the country, and some of their own measures that they're taking, I actually imagine that there will be ...

Not necessarily peaceful, and certainly not neat and tidy, but there will be some kind of absorption of the north by the south in a political way, and by China in an economic way, or both in an economic way with a huge role, probably for Japan, for other countries in the region, maybe even for the United States.

I imagine them going out with a whimper rather than a bang, and in less than 25 years, less than 25 years. Thank you again, so much. Thank you, thank you. Thank you. I like this. Thank you, thank you.

Hugh Roome: Very briefly before you go, we'd like to thank Foreign Policy Association for conceiving another great evening and a thoroughly provocative talk. Second, just PWC, thank you again, and to the Belknap family for conceiving this wonderful series.

Now with that, "Connectography," replete with its maps, is for sale in the back of the auditorium, so you're welcome to do that and then again, you can contact their website, and there are a number of quite fascinating talks from Dr. Khanna on YouTube if you choose to do that.

Thank you one more time.

Parag Khanna: Thank you.