New Thinking for a New World

The only hope for a world awash in troubles is that leaders with vision, universal values, and determination will seize the moment. Not just in politics, but across sectors and across countries. Unfortunately, nothing like that is yet happening.

But just bemoaning the lack of leaders accomplishes nothing. That’s why we established and have nurtured the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize.

In 2021 our global jury selected two amazing leaders: Asha de Vos, a Sri Lankan marine biologist who has established a world class marine conservation research and education institution in her country, and Tero Mustonen, a Finnish climate scientist, fisherman and community leader, who blends the wisdom of local and Indigenous peoples with the hard truths of scientists to define new approaches to climate change.

Listen as two Tällberg jurors—David Kiernan, a leading American litigator and Marthe Reinette, of the THNK School of Creative Leadership in the Netherlands—discuss leadership, challenges and hope with Asha and Tero

In August, 1968 American anti-war protesters chanted, “The Whole World is Watching.” What might have been hyperbole then, is fact now: the whole world really is watching Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Except for audiences in Russia itself, that is, where there is virtually no reporting of what is happening in Ukraine that doesn’t mesh with the government’s narrative about what it calls its “special operation” to crush Ukrainian “Nazism” in the pursuit of “Christian values.”

**Surreal, perhaps. But, hyper real, in fact.

When the government stopped her from publishing and ended her radio show, she found ways to keep talking to her Russian audiences. And when I asked her to talk to us, she immediately agreed.

At great personal peril, Yevgenia tells it like it is—to the Russians who depend on her and to us, who need her.

Arguably, any understanding of the Russian invasion of Ukraine must take into account the Beijing Winter Olympics or, rather, the meeting there of Presidents Xi and Putin. They held extensive talks about the state of the world and about their relationship. When they finished, they declared that friendship between China and Russia “has no limits" and that “there are no forbidden areas of cooperation.” Can there be any doubt that they included Putin’s war plans as well as Xi's willingness to provide support when the much-advertised Western sanctions eventually kicked in?

Why did Xi apparently green light Putin's war? What does China potentially gain from war in Europe? How does this war fit into China's long-term strategy?

Almost a year ago, Jonathan Ward shared with us his thinking about "China's Vision of Victory," which was also the title of a book he had recently published. Now he reflects on China’s role in Russia’s war and the implications for the United States and the rest of the West.

What do you think?

The world is transfixed by the tragic images emerging from Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine: broken people and families, destroyed schools, homes and buildings. Unfortunately, many modern conflicts never really end, so the casualties of such wars never have a chance to heal. Whether or not that will be the case in Ukraine remains to be seen, but that certainly describes the wars in Syria, the West Bank, Gaza, Bosnia, parts of Africa, and elsewhere. In a globalizing world where war was supposed to be a thing of the past, that shouldn't be happening, which ironically may be part of the explanation for why it is.** We too quickly move on to the next issue, assuming that what's done is done.**

War correspondents and war photographers know better. Our guest, Janine di Giovanni has spent much of her celebrated career so far reporting from the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East. She has witnessed the worst of what mankind can do to itself, but also the best that people under extraordinary circumstances can do for others. And that balance between evil and good comes through in her reporting.

Listen as she discusses her experiences and, in particular, the work she has done on the lives of Palestinians in Gaza.

What do YOU think?

This conversation was recorded before the start of Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Most of us thought the war in the Balkans would be the last conflict in Europe; the last time that armies would invade, civilians die and borders changed by force. We were wrong. A revanchist Russia, led by President Putin, is trying to redraw borders, roll back history, and change Europe’s security reality. This is not a new Cold War, but a very hot one.

In that spirit, the Tällberg Foundation recently hosted a conversation about the conflict in Ukraine and its implications—likely to be the first of many. This conversation featured Jan Eliasson, former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Pierre Lellouche, former French parliamentarian and minister, and Dalia Bankauskaitė, a strategic communications expert at Vilnius University in Lithuania, and was moderated by Alan Stoga, Tällberg’s chairman.

Wars have cycles: sooner or later, the fighting ends and the negotiations begin. As hard as it is to imagine amidst the unfolding tragedy of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the diplomats and politicians will eventually gather to define new borders, behaviors, and rules. The Russian attack shattered the European security structure that had evolved after the Cold War ended; something must replace it.

Of course how the fighting ends will shape whatever negotiations ensue. But it is never too early to think about the future contours of the map of Europe.

This podcast with Emma Ashford, Washington-based Atlantic Council geopolitical expert, was recorded before Russia attacked Ukraine. Nonetheless, Emma's thoughts and speculation about a new security structure for Europe are even more important now than when we discussed them before President Putin chose to go to war.

Please let us know what you think about this episode of ‘New Thinking for a New World.”

"We may remain, as we are now, nominally democratic, but be ruled by a technocratic class empowered by greater powers of surveillance than those enjoyed by even the noisiest of dictatorships.”

Those words were written by Joel Kotkin in a recently published essay on democracy’s demise. Donald Trump is not the villain of the piece, as most pundits want us to believe, nor other populists outside the United States. Rather, Kotkin argues that the withering of democratic process and institutions reflects the deeper transformation of American and European societies: the emergence of a ruling technocracy; the use of the pandemic and the environmental crisis to constrain individual rights; the new concentration of power in governments, and the growing distance between the governing and the governed. All of it made worse by the mind-boggling concentration of economic wealth, which is as much an issue in China as it is in the United States.

Kotkin’s analysis deserves our attention. What do you think—not about Trump, but about democracy? Who can do what to bend the arc away from the dystopian end game that he and others describe?

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in California and Executive Director of the Urban Reform Institute, as well as the author of the Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class.

Climate change is the ultimate example of a problem that can only meaningfully be addressed at the global level. Dramatic action in a few countries may be interesting, maybe even important depending on the countries, but actually reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere requires many countries moving rapidly in the same direction.

Last November, more than 100 countries sent delegations—many including presidents and prime ministers—to Glasgow for the 26th United Nations High Level Meeting on Climate. It was supposed to an inflection point, not only to deepen national commitments, but to force the transformational changes in how energy is produced and consumed in order to hold the rise in global warming to one and a half degrees or less.

The results were mixed. Many new commitments were made, but not enough to meet the 1.5 degrees goal. And that was the easy part; delivering policies that actually bend the arc of global climate change is quite another. How likely is that? Is the UN process working? And, since China was notable for its failure to engage in Glasgow, does any of it really matter if the country responsible for about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions is effectively sitting on the sidelines?

No one is better positioned to answer those questions than Ambassador Tomas Anker Christensen, Denmark's Climate Ambassador. Tomas was deeply engaged in the European and global run up to Glasgow, in the negotiations in Scotland, and in the effort since then to translate words into action. Ambassador Christensen recently served as a juror for the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize.

In many, perhaps most countries in the West, there is a wide and growing gap between citizens and their political leaders. Governments often fail to deliver on basic aspects of the social contract and voters sometimes respond by endorsing extreme solutions on the right or the left. Populists have not proven any better at delivering what voters want, so anger and frustration increase while democracy suffers. COVID made it worse. On the one hand, most governments in most places gathered extraordinary powers during the pandemic. On the other hand, few governments actually translated that power into better outcomes for their citizens.

Even as the pandemic seems to be easing, the residue remains: more inequality, more inflation, more economic and social stress. If there is a silver lining, it is that our sorry condition has caused some people to rethink how politics ought to work and try to reinvent, rather than tear down, democratic processes and institutions. Alice Barbe, a French political activist, has founded the Academy of Future Leaders to do exactly that. Alice was a finalist in last year's Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize and recently shared her ideas, hopes and solutions. Do you think she is headed in the right direction?

Hostile troops massing on the border of a Central European democracy, fears of staged provocations, risk of a wider conflict that could spiral out of control, urgent diplomatic negotiations that fail to soften a would be aggressor's demands. No, it's not 1938, it's 2022, but Russia's threats against Ukraine and its demands for new security and arrangements in Europe sound all too familiar.

Of course, the huge difference today is that Germany is not only firmly anchored in the West but is a cornerstone of the European Union. Nonetheless, today's Germany is a center stage in the Ukraine crisis.

The Ukraine crisis is far from over; however it ends, the consequences will be profound. Constanze Stelzenmüller—an expert on Germany, geopolitics and trans-Atlantic relations who is based at the Brookings Institution in Washington—is deeply knowledgeable about all aspects of the crisis. Listen as she shares her views on what is at stake.