See the show notes for this episode: S 01 | Ep 48 Deep Dive: Navigating the Complexities of Global Power Dynamics. 

0:00:00 - Alex Shevelenko

Welcome to Experience-focused Leaders! I am delighted to introduce you to Dmitri Alperovitch, founder and CTO of CrowdStrike, a leading security company with a market cap of over $84 billion. He's a Chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator and, most interestingly for today's discussion, a national best-selling author of the book called World on the Brink. Dmitri, welcome to the pod!

0:00:31 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Thanks so much for having me!

0:00:32 - Alex Shevelenko

I am so impressed with the range of your accomplishments, starting from being an entrepreneur but having come from an immigrant to the US background and having achieved tremendous success all the way to now really changing the mindset of our foreign policy establishment, ringing the bells. In a very similar way in which George Kennan's long telegram set up a policy for containment during Cold War I, you're introducing that during Cold War II. We'll come back to that in a second. Because I think the reason you're getting these insights and the reason you have the credibility in shaking things up in our establishment actually comes from that journey as an entrepreneur. So let's dive into that. Tell us how you got into information security as it was called back then, and what was the insight about adversarial threats that really undermined the success of CrowdStrike and beyond?

0:01:43 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Thanks so much for having me! So I've been involved in the cybersecurity industry really since high school. I got into it a little bit by accident because my dad got interested. He had an applied mathematics background in the Soviet Union. He got interested in encryption and elliptic curve cryptography back in the early to mid-90s. I ended up helping him out and we even started a small company together when I was still in high school. It was in the subset of the overall cybersecurity space, encryption.

But I very quickly realized that there's an inherent appeal of this whole space to me. Primarily because I love chess, these adversarial games. And cybersecurity is very much that. You're facing a sentient opponent. You're not facing nature or trying to just solve a problem that exists and once you solve it you're done. In cyber you're never done because of course, as long as there are bad people out there that wish to do harm, they're going to find a way to do that.

So that cat and mouse game I found really, really interesting and intellectually stimulating. I ended up going to college and focusing on that and being actually the first graduate out of Georgia Tech with a master's degree in what was then called information security. After that I went into the startup world and ultimately, about a decade later, ended up co-founding a company called CrowdStrike. I ended up finding that there was a big problem inside the cybersecurity industry that was not being paid attention to, which is nation-state attacks, initially from China, but then Russia, Iran, and North Korea. They were breaking into private companies for espionage purposes, for stealing secrets and intellectual property, and later on, also doing disruptive and destructive attacks.

0:03:55 - Alex Shevelenko

I'm just going to pause you for a second. I'm going to share one of your quotes which I found particularly interesting as we were doing research. This is from a few years later when you were at Silverado. Your quote, “We do not have a cyber problem. We have a China, Russia, Iran and North Korea problem.” And it sounds like that's something that is not just a recent discovery. That it was a foundational to what was behind CrowdStrike's success.

0:04:24 - Dmitri Alperovitch

I don't remember the exact date, but it was in the early 2010s, just as we were launching CrowdStrike, that I coined that. Because I appreciated that this was not just going to be solved through cyber and that geopolitics was at the root of this evolving problem.

Even if you look at the range of threat actors in cyberspace, including nation-states, criminals, and hacktivist threat actors, many of them come from these four countries: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

Not because they have a monopoly on all offensive cyber activity. But simply because they either don't enforce or even, in many cases, encourage their non-state actors to go after Western businesses and Western governments, because they find that to be helpful in their overall confrontation with the West. So we certainly have cyber criminals in America. We have cyber criminals in Europe, but they tend to get arrested. They tend to have a fairly short lifespan in that career. But it is the criminals that are outside of our jurisdiction, outside of our ability to bring them to justice. That tends to become the most prolific and most dangerous. And then, of course, you've got the nation-states, and these four are the primary nation-state actors. Geopolitics has always been at the root of cyber, at least for the last 15-plus years. And that was part of the incentives for starting CrowdStrike — realizing that this is only getting worse.

0:06:03 - Alex Shevelenko

And what else would you attribute the success of CrowdStrike? Obviously cyber is a huge problem, in part some of the reasons you're explaining. You know what's behind that. But what else was behind the original insight, which part of it was execution? Earlier we talked about being competitive and wanting to win. It is a remarkable story at the pace of growth and in a place where there were a lot of established competitors around it.

0:06:37 - Dmitri Alperovitch

A lot of things have to go right to have a huge success. Timing is really key to this. We started just as this whole what was known as APT (Advanced Persistent Threat), which is really a euphemism for nation-state actors, was exploding and no one was really focused on it. At the same time, you had the established companies, McAfee and Symantec. I actually was at McAfee before starting CrowdStrike. They were really in the process of dying. There were these dinosaurs that had been around for three decades, that were kind of coming down under their own weight and bureaucracy could not innovate. 

Originally, before starting CrowdStrike, I wanted to do some of these ideas at McAfee, my employer, and there was just no interest in the company pursuing that. Being a public company, it was very hard to invest in innovation because you kind of lived quarter by quarter. One day you would get resources and the next day they would be taken away from you. Because they needed to make sure that the numbers still looked good for Wall Street. And that was just not conducive to innovation, to investment. As a result, we were able to succeed and ultimately replace these companies. McAfee and Symantec are now long gone, but at the time when we started the company they were the main threats to us from a business perspective.

0:08:11 - Alex Shevelenko

Got it. And when you look at your engagement with the government, both in the McAfee where, like the Operation Aurora that you started, when did you feel that you were going to get involved actively in the policy work that you're doing right now? Is it always obvious to you that this is something that you wanted to be a part of as you were tackling this problem and you realized, “Hey, why are we the only ones that are really understanding these problems or tackling them? We need to help.” Did you feel a call? Is it just intellectual curiosity? I'm really curious because as an entrepreneur, that's really sophisticated in technology. Oftentimes normal path would be just to stay in technology, do another deeply technical startup and continue innovating. That way you've really thought, obviously, to bring that technical expertise as a CTO of CrowdStrike. But you're spreading into the communications world. How to persuade and drive policy decisions? What was behind that?

0:09:20 - Dmitri Alperovitch

I've always had a passion for international relations and foreign policy. Ultimately, I was focused on solving problems, and I guess I appreciated that technology was never sufficient.

It was often a necessary component, but it was not enough. This passion for working with the government really started very early on, right out of college, as I was joining a startup that was focused on email security and working for a gentleman named Jay Chaudhry who went on to found another huge company, Zscaler, a huge success story in cybersecurity. I was focused at the time on the spam problem and phishing attacks and ended up working with the law not just from a technical perspective, but also from a policy and law enforcement perspective. And then that just got amplified as the technology defense agriculture and many are opposed to the Chinese regime. That ended up getting me much more involved in Washington, moving to DC and working closely with a number of government agencies and focusing on policy. 

0:11:38 - Alex Shevelenko

So let's take that policy view right now that you have, and let's dive into Cold War II. And let's start with your famous prediction of the unfortunate situation in Ukraine was the Russian invasion a few months before the actual event. We'll share the tweet that you've produced that had quite a lot of views in the episode later. But what was driving that insight for you? Was it connecting the dots from general perspective, also having an insight, having lived through the history of Cold War I, so to speak, right Having been educated already in the USSR for part of your time, having had the connection and pattern matching, that provided a clearer insight than many other folks had about what's going to happen with the invasion of Ukraine.

0:12:35 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Yeah, thanks for asking that question. So back in kind of early December, I had become convinced that Putin was not just bluffing, as he was trying to mobilize his forces on the borders of Ukraine about three months before the actual invasion took place in February 24th.

And I became convinced, um having followed him very closely over the last 25 years his writings, his speeches that he was really serious this time and that he was going to take this action and there were five reasons that I thought were driving him towards invasion and, by the way, those five reasons are the same reasons that I think that Xi Jinping wants to invade Taiwan and they have to do with, first and foremost, history, and a distorted view of history that both of these men have. You know, in the case of Putin, he thinks that Ukraine is not a nation, that they're just an offshoot of the Russians and they should not exist as a country and it's an aberration of history that they were allowed to exist. He blames Lenin for creating the Soviet Union and the sort of exit treaty of the Soviet Union that allowed these republics to separate from the Soviet Union. He also believes in both his personal and Russia's destiny to unify these lands that had once belonged to the Russian Empire. He sees himself famously and he has compared himself several times to Peter the Great, the czar of Russia, that has expanded the Russian Empire and was actually the first emperor of Russia, and he wants, of course, to expand Russian lands or at least retake what he feels are rightful Russian lands.

And Ukraine is first and foremost in his mind, but there is also security and a geographic reason for one in Ukraine that actually transcends Putin and is something that has found broad support across the Russian political spectrum for a long time, and that is both a defensive and an offensive way to look at Ukraine. From a defensive perspective, Russia has, of course, weathered numerous invasions from Europe over centuries whether it's Hitler, whether it's Napoleon, Teutonic Knights, the Poles and many others and a number of those invasions have gone through Ukraine on their way to Moscow. And Ukraine, being a huge country, has given Russia that strategic depth to allow themselves to mobilize and prepare for the defense of the capital while fighting on Ukrainian lands. But also from an offensive perspective, Ukraine is a window into Europe. It borders Poland, it borders Slovakia, and if you want to project power into Europe, you also want to have leverage over Ukraine.

So as he was looking at NATO flirtations from Ukraine, even though it wasn't about to join NATO, he was seeing it sort of fall further and further away from his grasp, and that was motivating some of the timing for invasion, because he thought that if he didn't do something soon, he would lose Ukraine forever. And that brings us to the fifth and probably the most important cause of the conflict. And that brings us to the fifth and probably the most important cause of the conflict and his ego. He wanted to take credit for this. He wanted to for this to be done on his watch. It wasn't enough to say well, some future leader of Russia will finish this off and we can afford to wait for a long time and use sort of gray zone tactics and the like to try to bring Ukraine into our fold. He wanted to do it himself. And, by the way, the same reason, I believe, is driving Xi to try to invade Taiwan in his own lifetime, and it's not an accident that both men are now in their 70s.

0:16:42 - Alex Shevelenko

So we'll come back to Xi and your prediction that the way we started the book, that the invasion is going to happen in 2028 and it's kind of really interestingly connected to the timing that you've mentioned.

But let's kind of compare notes on one other person that you probably don't love but who has predicted that something similar would happen to what has happened. That's John Muir Scheimer. So he's used much more a single lens through which he looked at the events right, great power politics view and the power struggle, and he was out looking into Putin's personality and ego and some of these other things that you brought up which, by the way, I probably agree with you on still predicted that for some strategic reasons, from NATO expansion, the timing around that and it's going to be too late as Ukraine, effectively, was becoming integrated at least partially into activities of the NATO that it would be difficult. So what's your take on? What is he missing? What is he getting right? Because in some ways, some of your recommendations actually aligned reasonably well with real politic kind of worldview of Mearsheimer and maybe even what Kissinger would have predicted. So I'd love to get your take on that, if I'm reading it correctly or not.

0:18:11 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Yeah, I actually don't agree that Mearsheimer is in line anymore with real political thinking. I actually debated him on this very issue of the Ukraine invasion a few months into the war. Look, he is all about sort of monocausal elements of driving this conflict. I don't believe that in either real life or in geopolitics that you have a single cause for anything. Life is way too complex. So I do not prescribe to the view that NATO expansion is the single and only cause of this conflict. I also don't believe that it has absolutely nothing to do with it.

I think it contributed to the overall desire for Putin to take Ukraine, and both primarily. Not there's an element of seeing NATO as a threat. But more importantly, NATO membership for Ukraine represented the foregoing of the chance to control Ukraine, which was really at the heart of it. Right, if he was just only concerned about NATO being on Russia's borders, well, he has failed massively because you just had Finland join, that has a huge border with NATO and he has not done anything to address that and, you know, has not invaded Finland. Of course, Sweden obviously joined as well and made sure that basically, the Baltic Sea is a lake for NATO. None of that is even registering a whole lot within Russia's political discourse. So it was not just NATO.

0:19:55 - Alex Shevelenko

It was a desire to control. It was a desire to control.

0:19:58 - Dmitri Alperovitch

It was the feeling of destiny and history that Ukraine was not a nation, that it belonged to Russia. You know completely false interpretation, of course.

0:20:19 - Alex Shevelenko

And it was a desire to have Ukraine as part of Russia's power projection, particularly into Europe. No-transcript. You've highlighted in the book that you know struck me was the sort of the century of shame for China, and you know you obviously have the same. You brought up some of the same empathy for, you know Russia feeling vulnerable, being invaded through Ukraine multiple times in history, and we know that it is sort of embedded in the psyche and the education system from at least Soviet era of like all these invasions and all these folks that are trying to attack us. So this is sort of a really deeply sensitive view. So you have this you bring up the sensitivity, so to speak, to the adversary, which is great.

How do we build on that tradition to potentially de-escalate the situation that we have in Ukraine? And the thought that I have is the Kennedy speech delivered at the American University, well known as the the peace speech, right, and it really was unique in a way that it connected American audience to appreciate that you may be adversary versus Soviet Union, but you could still have certain things in common, you could still find mutually agreeable areas of interest, and it feels to me like this is very hard to do in our world. We're struggling to do this sometimes internally. We're struggling to do this externally. How would you approach this to that particular conflict and challenges around resolving it right now that we all feel somewhat hopeless, I would say in where we are today?

0:22:29 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Yeah, I think our foreign policy since President Carter's and Brzezinski's days in the late 70s has become very moralistic. We tend to see things as good versus evil. And look, there's certainly a number of evil regimes out there. But if you have that confrontation of good versus evil and you are not looking at the path to potential coexistence with some of these countries, you're going to be fighting a lot. Even as he called the Soviet Union the evil empire, of course was engaging with Gorbachev and had numerous summits and arms control treaties and the like. So even he appreciated that talking was important. Look, I just wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs that talks about how Taiwan is really the new West Berlin. So it's interesting that you bring up Kennedy, because I think that was a very pivotal moment in his administration for the whole outcome of the Cold War. And it's not the Cuban Missile Crisis that everyone cites, although it was certainly important, but it was actually a year prior and it was the West Berlin Crisis. So Kennedy had come into office intent on getting to a better relationship with Khrushchev and asking Khrushchev to have the summit that they would end up having in June of 1961 in Vienna, trying to come up to essentially an early detente with the Soviet Union and find a way to coexist. And the summit was a total failure because Khrushchev pressed his advantage and basically Americans and other Western allies had to withdraw from West Berlin and that you know, the communist forces would, would essentially take over West Berlin. And Kennedy came out of that summit, shook up, realizing that we were on a path to war. In fact he went on American television in July of that, that, that summer, and said that said to the American people that we should be preparing for war, including nuclear war. Right, he had told Congress that he was asking for additional appropriations to identify fallout shelters across America, to invest in more identification of early launch capabilities from the Soviets and the like. And he also told the American public that we were going to fight potentially an existential conflict over this little space of territory, over 100 miles away from any West German border, that is, west Berlin. And Khrushchev blinks and in August of 1961, Kennedy's woken up and he's told that East Germans, on orders from the Soviets, were building what would become the Berlin Wall. And it's interesting because the Berlin Wall of course became a symbol for everything that was evil about the Cold War and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. But at the time when Kennedy is told on the Saturday morning that the wall is being built or Sunday morning, I'm sorry, he celebrated. He basically sighed in relief and said, thank God, thank God he's building the wall. That means he's not invading and that means that war is not going to be very likely.

And indeed, even though we had the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, which was actually now growth of the West Berlin Crisis, post that period, post 1962, you had a great deal of stabilization in the relationship.

The Cold War persisted and of course you had Vietnam in the 1970s. You have Afghanistan, all these proxy fights around the world, but the danger that America and the Soviet Union would get into confrontation, including a nuclear one, diminished dramatically and it allowed for the detente to merge in the 1970s, with Kissinger and Nixon going to Moscow and building a better relationship with Brezhnev. So what I argue in this piece is that Taiwan is that West Berlin issue that is existential for China, I believe is really essential for America, and that, if you remove that thorn from our side, you could get to a better relationship. It will not end the Cold War. There will still be this global competition for supremacy between China and the United States. But the chances that we would ever go to war over some artificial island in South China Sea or some rock in the East China Sea is basically null.

0:27:39 - Alex Shevelenko

But we could go to war over Taiwan. Let's pause here because I like just walk me through, you know, as less educated person than yourself on this topic. Right, I haven't been to Taiwan and did all the work, but why would you consider West Berlin to be existential?

0:27:57 - Dmitri Alperovitch

You mean Taiwan?

0:27:59 - Alex Shevelenko

No, West Berlin in particular. Right, because I think, if you're making drawing that parallel, that West Berlin is the best example. To me, the Cuban missile crisis feels a lot more existential from a police American point of view than West Berlin.

0:28:14 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Remember a Cuban missile Crisis was 13 days and, yes, we were at high risk of war. I'm not trying to diminish the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that summer of 1961 was almost three months when the entire country was on edge and we were preparing for war. It was a lot longer and it was more intense than the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy basically made the case that we had to make a stand in West Berlin, that this was critical to our credibility, that we had made commitments to West Berlin and the freedom of their people and we would not allow the Soviets to roll us on this, and that it would be essential to the containment of further expansionism of communism and the Soviet influence of Iran-Europe that we had to make a stand. We were not going to force liberation of Eastern Europe, but we were not going to let them take anymore. And that was the symbol of West Berlin that was so critical to Kennedy and why he was willing to risk an existential nuclear conflict over this small piece of territory.

0:29:22 - Alex Shevelenko

Got it. So, Taiwan, why do you believe this? The stand that we take right now will not lead to confrontation if we aggressively take that stand. I think that's part of your argument is, if we are aggressive and we prevent the invasion and make it very unattractive to drive the invasion, then things somehow will stabilize. They will not be pretty, there will be continued competition to drive the invasion. Then things somehow will stabilize. Right, they will not be pretty, there will be continued competition.

But if we make a stand right now and, you know, in the next few years, it sounds like that's sort of the most principled thing that we could do from a policy perspective, right, and then the competition will continue. But you know, if we miss this moment, then either we have a bad escalation during the crisis or we start on the United States as going on the decline and China may emerge as the next superpower and a leader, at least in Asian region, but potentially globally. So what you're saying is precisely that Taiwan is the next few years in Taiwan is the moment of truth for Cold War II.

0:30:49 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Yeah. So first of all, we have to talk about why Taiwan matters to us, and we have this very reductionist view in our political system and among the general populace that Taiwan really only matters to us because of chips that they manufacture. They're, of course, a powerhouse of manufacturing of chips. 90 percent of advanced chips are in Taiwan. About 40 percent of so-called foundational chips are being manufactured in Taiwan as well, and that's really important.

I don't want to underestimate the importance of chips to our digital economy. They're absolutely crucial. I like to say that they're not the new oil, as some people describe them, because there are alternatives to oil. There are no alternatives to semiconductors, so they're much more important than oil. But nevertheless, Taiwan is much more important to us than just chips and it has always been that way. In fact, we have a long history with Taiwan, going back to even in 1950, General Douglas MacArthur called Formosa, as Taiwan was called at the time, the unsinkable aircraft carrier. And to understand its importance you have to look at the map, and in the book I have this map of China, which is a little bit different from the way that people typically look at the map of China. So typically you see this huge landmass of China and this little speck of land next to it, that is Taiwan, if we can pull it up right now, your map.

0:32:13 - Alex Shevelenko

So it would be, I think, here. This is from the Audible PDF that you have for the book. This is the map that you're referring to.

0:32:22 - Dmitri Alperovitch

This is a map. I wish they had done it in colors, but nevertheless you can see that Taiwan is really at that anchor point of the so-called first island chain. And if you're China and you're looking out at the world and this map really articulates it you see yourself completely contained. Right from the eastern part you're facing the Korean peninsula, half of which South Korea, is an American ally, with American bases, 28,000 American troops, radar installations, air bases and the like. Then, going further down, you have the Japanese islands, where you have the headquarters of the Seventh Fleet Marines in Okinawa, enormous military capabilities there, right in the center, you have Taiwan that is facing most of the Chinese ports across the Taiwan Strait and nearby in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, seen as an outpost of American power and closing down that arc, you effectively have the Philippines where, once again, for the first time in 30 years, we have American military bases being established on that island or at least existing Filipino bases being given access to American military. And you also notice the waters. The waters on Chinese shores, both in the East China Sea and South China Sea, are very, very shallow. In fact, in the Taiwan Strait they're about 300 feet, but if you go to the other side of Taiwan, to its eastern side, they drop down to 12,000 feet, and the Pacific Ocean, of course, is the deepest ocean in the world. Why does it matter? Well, for China to become the world's greatest power, as they believe is their rightful place in the world, as they have been for much of their history, for much of human history. They were the most populous country on the planet, the richest, the most powerful, and it's only in the last few hundred years, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, that first the Europeans and then later America eclipsed them in that spot. And they see their rejuvenation, as she calls it, really being able to take that rightful place as the world's greatest superpower. Well, if you as the world's greatest superpower, well, if you're the world's greatest superpower, you can't allow yourself to be contained by America and its allies, like you see on this map. And, in fact, the key to being a global superpower that was true of the American power, that was true of the British power is naval power, projection right. You could trace the dawn of American rise in terms of our power to the early 1900s and Teddy Roosevelt sending the so-called Great White Fleet around the world to circumvent the world to announce that American power has arrived, that the rise of the US Navy to be able to traverse the world's ocean to make them safe for commerce, both for American consumers as well as to export American goods to the rest of the world, really enabled us to build up our power and become the world's greatest superpower, eventually eclipsing Great Britain.

While China has similar ambitions, it is investing a lot in shipbuilding capacity it is now the world's greatest shipbuilder. It is investing in Blue, small and largely controlled choke points, controlled by US allies and US military. And you can't Taiwan submarine bases and effectively eject the US out of the Western Pacific. Push them all the way back to Hawaii and dominate that region. Not necessarily dominate in the sense that you know. I don't believe that China is going to be on this massive Nazi Germany-like march across Asia. You know, invading Philippines, invading Japan, but they don't have to. All you have to do is look at Russia and Russia's ability to project influence, and it's near abroad, whether it's Belarus, whether it's Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan and Central Asia, or even the Caucasus, with Armenia and even Georgia. In most of these cases, they don't even have to invade these countries. Simply being the big, powerful neighbor is enough to dictate the rules of trade, the rules of security order in their region, and that would be China and China's ability to do that.

0:37:04 - Alex Shevelenko

So if China takes over Taiwan, it's effectively saying, hey, there's a new sheriff in town and it's going to be the new hegemon in the most important region of the world.

0:37:13 - Dmitri Alperovitch

This is where you have almost 50% of the world's GDP, most of the world's supply chains, most of the economic growth. So if you dominate that region, if you eject Americans out of that region, then you can use that as a power base to also project even more influence than they already do across the globe, whether it's Latin America, whether it's Africa, Europe and so forth, and that will mean a decline of American power and, ultimately, a security situation that's much worse for America, greater potential to fight wars and, ultimately, an America that is less safe and less economically secure, lower growth rates and the like, so that is why Taiwan matters to China and why it matters to the United States.

0:37:58 - Alex Shevelenko

Got it, but like one, one thing that it would be great to extrapolate. Why do you believe there will be greater propensity to fight wars? Is it as they balance each other out? The competition is more intense, right, you could argue. During Cold War I the fact that America and the Soviet Union were reasonably close at times, there was a sufficient deterrent from avoiding direct wars. How do we think about that more dangerous world that emerges from that?

0:38:31 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Well look, an America that is no longer able to enforce the global security order that was established since 1945, since the end of World War Two, is an America that is ultimately less secure, because you will see more conflicts around the world, more dangerous regimes propping up, more dictatorships, more authoritarian regimes, something that China is absolutely trying to export around the world. In fact, just in recent years, they opened up a school in Africa for emerging African leaders to basically teach them how to build a surveillance state, how to build an authoritarian state. So they're trying to export their ideology, not necessarily communist ideology, but an authoritarian ideology around the world.

And you know there is this theory in international relations that so far has been largely proven true, that democracies don't fight other democracies. So the more democracies you have out there, the safer the world will be. Because they'll be more accountable to their people and they'll find a way to address their problems in ways other than fighting wars. Dictators and authoritarian regimes don't necessarily have those types of political pressures and are much more likely to engage in a conflict. And if China is allowed to project its power across the world, you'll see more and more authoritarian regimes and more likely conflicts arising in the world.

0:40:06 - Alex Shevelenko

So let's play it back from the Chinese perspective and like evaluate, ok so American foreign policy. You mentioned kind of since you know let's find a period, let's maybe like Korean War, Vietnam War, so like from an outside perspective, right from, let's say, Chinese perspective, America during this, you know quote unquote peaceful period, America has been actively involved in enforcing its set of policies. The end outcome has turned out great for America, for obvious reasons winning the Cold War. But one of the things that, coming back to that Kennedy perspective of how does China think about the world, is something that will help us eventually find if there is a compromise, it will help us eventually find like is there? If there is a compromise, it will help us find it.

And you know, see which which parts of American foreign policy frankly didn't work right, like I think you know, I would say out there, I was behind supporting the Iraq war and you know when it came out, and then when I realized the impact of that, I was very disappointed that I misread, the leaves, misread the data and kind of followed the herd in that approach.

So, as an entrepreneur, somebody who likes to think for himself, how do you kind of reconcile the fact that we're obviously prefer to have America as generally, a nation that you know looks out for those in need, be the hegemon in the world, but at the same time the world is not it's pretty rare to have a single hegemon situation. And then how do you reconcile the Chinese worldview of what has been the role of America? Has it always been positive? And you know you've listed a reason, hundreds of reasons over hundreds of years, of where China has been, maybe felt like they've been promised things that didn't happen, and so maybe they may not believe in the benevolence of the American foreign policy the same way you and I may.

0:42:13 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Well, look, I don't necessarily agree that America has always had a benevolent foreign policy. We certainly made mistakes and I criticize a lot our foreign policy over the last 30-plus years where we've become too enamored with our hubris and power and decided that we are going to be the world's policemen and fix problems all over the world. I believe that was a great mistake. Iraq was a mistake. Staying in Afghanistan as long as we did, I supported going in to address Al Qaeda, but then we had an inflation and expansion of goals and suddenly it became about, you know, having girls go to school and build in democracy in Afghanistan, something that was probably never attainable and ultimately we lost a lot of our blood and treasure for goals that were destined to failure. So I don't believe necessarily that we are perfect and the rest of the world should applaud any time we act around the world. But I still think we're better than China and to the extent that we have tried to promote democratic values, free and fair trade and human rights, that's largely not always, but largely been good for the world, and you can't say the same thing about China. And I think that we have to be much more constrained in our power projection. One because we can no longer afford to do so, but two because it's not necessarily smart to try to instill our systems on the rest of the world.

I think we should lead by example as opposed to trying to, you know, enforce democracy on countries at a pointy end of a spear and browbeat people on these types of issues. Let them come to their own conclusions about which systems is better. And look, I think we have a significant problem on our southern border in terms of uncontrolled migration. That may pose security issues for us, but it is remarkable that so many people around the world, including from China, are coming across our border trying to find a better life for themselves and their children. No one is doing that in China, right? No one is jumping across the border to live in China. It's quite the opposite. So we still are the attractive system, the most innovative country in the world, and I think the world is better off with us being the world's greatest superpower versus China.

0:44:58 - Alex Shevelenko

That's not to say we're perfect.

Right. So this is the great nuance, and actually you brought me to one of the segments that I wanted to share, which is there's a there's famous long telegram from John Cannon. We got the original here and I think towards the end I'm going to see if I can find this chapter he brought up something that you literally just stated, which is this kind of final articulation of you know, yes, we should have this policy of containment, yes, we have these strategies, but first let's also believe in ourselves, and I'll quote this. But first let's also believe in ourselves, and I'll quote this finally, must have the courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with the problem of Soviet communism is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping, and it effectively relates to what you're saying, which is, hey, let's remember our strength, right, like we have great technology, innovation, we have great institutions great access to capital, the attractiveness of our country to allow for immigration.

0:46:20 - Dmitri Alperovitch

You know it should be legal immigration, it should be merit based immigration, but nevertheless we are attracting people from all over the world to come here. And that's just not the case with China. We have the world's greatest alliances, the world's greatest military, the world's largest economy. That is now very clear will likely never be eclipsed by China because their growth has subsided. So we have enormous advantages. The book you know called World on the Brink. It's a very dire title but it's actually very optimistic. Hopefully you found it.

So, Alex, because it talks about all the advantages that we have to win the Cold War, Cold War II. The big question mark that I don't address in the book is do we have the political will?

0:47:03 - Alex Shevelenko

Oh, that's a whole other debate.

0:47:06 - Dmitri Alperovitch

That's not something I weighed into.

0:47:08 - Alex Shevelenko

Yeah, but that's actually really interesting, right, because the democracy has its own mechanisms in generating that political will is tough and I think what you've you know. Let's go back to why is China succeeding and Russia succeeding in attracting these dictators? You know, in parts of Africa, right, and they're effectively, country by country, like French, are being kicked out. You know, Russians are coming in and I think the sentiment that you've brought up is that there's a lot less moralizing, right, it's a lot more, you know, maybe pragmatic, maybe it's autocratic, friendly, but let's be transparent.

America has had autocratic partners that were perhaps, maybe, anti-communist, but they were certainly not you know we have, we have them today and we have them today they're they start with letter s and they're very important, right like, but it's uh, but it is an interesting um challenge, right like, because our strength is our moral conviction. You know our kind of the way, the way of life, right, and then it seems to get in the way, and even though I think there's now verbiage coming from our foreign policy establishment that, hey, you know, we're not going to be preachy, we're not going to be prescriptive, but in reality it feels like almost nobody's believing.

0:48:32 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Well, because we do. We continue to do this right. And you know, the Biden administration comes in and says we're going to have the summit of democracies and we're going to exclude countries like not just Saudi Arabia, which you know one can understand, but Singapore and Bangladesh and all these other countries that are not quite democracies. But also, when you're doing that and you're saying we are in a fight of democracies versus authoritarians and you're basically saying to all these other countries, go pick a side and it won't be ours, right? You're pushing them into the arms of China and Russia and others, and I think that's a huge mistake.

Look, we got to work with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. It would be nice if everyone was a democracy, but that's up to them and there's nothing we can really do to make them change their government. We've tried that on a few occasions, has been a miserable failure. Let's not do that again and let's work with countries that are willing to help us in confronting this new enemy that we have in this new Cold War, which is China, and find ways to collaborate with them where we can, find ways to disagree with them where we must. But let's end this preachiness and moralization of our foreign policy that has not served us well.

0:49:57 - Alex Shevelenko

Great. So how do we find this empathy for the opponent right? Like, again, I want to push on this because it's when you start using words like adversary, right, which is the you know, in the larger scheme of things, you know it is right, like, how do we get back to that detente right that you're articulating? Because people get caught up in the words, right, Like, try to say, well, let's find peace in Ukraine right now, and everybody is really escalated, right, every like, nobody wants to talk, think about that, right, and so it's going to draw out right. How do we avoid that happening? Right, and how do we bring a discourse that is sober minded about the challenges that are facing us? Right, but at the same time, does not, you know, get us in the hate mode? Right, and again, I want to go back to Kennedy, if you don't mind, right, and like this to me, this part of that speech of commencement address at the American University, you know I'll quote him where he compares the burden of the Soviet Union and the United States, and I'll just quote it and I'd love to get your reaction that we're both cut up in a vicious and dangerous cycle, with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other side and new weapons, beginning counter weapons, in the short.

“Both United States and its allies and Soviet Union and its allies have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in holding the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interest of Soviet Union as well as ours, and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interests. So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. And then he says, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures and we all are mortal.”

So, in the context of this brinkmanship that we're getting to, particularly around Taiwan, and given the influential role that, you see, Kennedy has played in the Cold War, how do we apply this thinking right, this is a few years after all these crises to our policy decisions, right? Is this too early Right? Do we still need to have our? Because this speech took place after West Berlin. David Schawel.

0:52:34 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Berlin Wall, right, and you know a metaphorical one, of course across the Taiwan Straits that deters an evasion of Taiwan by China. And notice that speech you just quote, which is a great speech and I agree wholeheartedly with what he was saying was in 1963, two years after the Berlin Wall was built, a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and again at that point the risk of war has diminished dramatically and we can afford to talk about arms control and understand the Soviets and the like. And look for much of our official relations with China. Since 1979, when we officially recognized the PRC as a representative of China, we've had great relations with them, right, because they were much weaker and they did not pose a threat to invading Taiwan. Now I argue that we largely dropped our eye off the ball because they were militarizing for this opportunity while we were distracted with various crises, including the Middle East, where you now are facing a situation where the balance of power is changing and they are now credibly threatening Taiwan. Right, if you undo that and effectively restore that balance of power that has existed over the last 45 years and prevent, you know, the ability of China to unify with Taiwan by force, you can go back to the detente that we have had since 1979. You could have better relations. Now. I still think we're going to have a lot of problems with China and we need to be much stronger on issues like IP theft, on issues like overcapacity, unfair trade and the like. But we're not going to go to war over any of these issues, right, the relationship will ebb and flow. By the way, we have trade disputes that are quite vicious, even with the European Union, right, we're not going to war with the European Union over them. But the difference right now is that we are on a path to what could be a very catastrophic war. We have to deter at all costs.

There are basically three possibilities here. Right, the Goldilocks possibility is that we deter conflict. China never invades. It realizes invasion is an impossibility and we go back to being not friends but, you know, still Cold War adversaries, but ones that are not on a path to war and that can cooperate in some areas and compete in others. Or the two other options are that it launches an invasion and either wins or it loses, and obviously, you know, in both these scenarios there's a question of does America fight or not? But I argue that in both these circumstances, whether we fight or not, it's a disaster for the world. It means resurgence China. It means probably global depression. In the case of war over Taiwan, probably 10 trillion dollars wiped out in the first year. We have to avoid that, that option at all costs and it's not great for China either.

0:55:36 - Alex Shevelenko

It's a lose, loselose is basically what you're saying, right? Because whatever the outcome, the China trade will be also negatively affected. Even if they have achieved some sort of success, the process will be detrimental to the Chinese economic progress, in the short term at least. Is that, is that accurate in your view?

0:56:03 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Well, it depends on how it goes. So you know Xi Jinping is going to be focused on two things. If he goes for this, he'll be focused on deterring America from intervening and he'll be focused on trying to take Taiwan as quickly as possible. So you know, people talk about how the invasion of Ukraine by Putin was this terrible mistake. That has ended up being much worse for Russia, certainly in the medium to long term, and that's true. But it could have easily gone the other way.

If he had been able to capture Kyiv in the first few days of that invasion and, by the way, it was very close. Most people don't appreciate how close it came we would be talking here right now about Putin being the genius and being able to take Ukraine, just like he took Crimea, in a very rapid fashion. That's the option that Xi Jinping is going to hope for. You know, whether he succeeds or not is you or not remains to be seen. But if he does, that won't necessarily be bad for China, right? Because the rest of the world will be very eager to move on once Taiwan is taken, particularly once China establishes themselves as a hegemon in the region, and continue trading with them.

0:57:16 - Alex Shevelenko

So in this, like you brought up that in the book, does not address the issue of political will of the United States. Right, and let's explore it right now. Right, a little bit. So there's obvious, because that is the key question between you know, now three major conflict areas on the table right, the constant debates about funding the trade-offs that we need to the table. And you were saying, hey, you know, maybe these areas are not as important. This Taiwan preemptive containment is what's important. Can we allocate resources here effectively? That's what I see kind of the book, because in the larger scheme of things that is the most important thing that we could be doing.

And yet there's, you know the politics in the United States, together with the economic pressures are not looking very favorable, that you know this will be heated. How do you influence our political community to this threat, and effectively? We came from a world where communications and propaganda in the Soviet Union was a very important part of the system. Right, we could argue one of the reasons Cold War I was won was that America communicated about its way of life and made it more attractive. And you writing this book is an important component of alerting all stakeholders. From politics to kind of regular citizens that may be listening to this podcast, to the situation. What's your take? You know what's working there in breaking through the noise and driving that attention towards difficult, challenging things, whether it's going to the moon or fighting for Berlin Wall or defending Taiwan.

0:59:13 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Yeah, well, look, I don't address the political situation because that's not my job.

I don't focus on politics.

We work at Silverado on a bipartisan basis with folks on both sides of the aisle.

This town, Washington DC, is the one issue that seems to be the uniting force is China. And when you look at any of the progress that has been made in the last few years, particularly on Capitol Hill, whether it's the Chips and Science Act that has helped to restore or at least stall the decline of our semiconductor manufacturing industry, a really important bill that was passed on a bipartisan basis, primarily as an anti-China bill, as a way to deal with China whether you look at the TikTok bill, forcing the vestige of TikTok right. So in a whole slew of these issues, both Democrats and Republicans found common ground, even though they don't on pretty much anything else, because most of both parties realize that China is a threat, even if they don't want to call it a Cold War. So that gives me some hope. And you know, the book articulates a strategy for winning this Cold War, for avoiding a hot war, Cold War for avoiding a hot war, and I hope that it's going to register both in the halls of Congress and the administration and really across America.

1:00:46 - Alex Shevelenko

So, on that note, right like so, American thinking and American communications expertise has had a role in, you know, influencing soviet population, and we could talk about Radio Free Europe and you know other initiatives. Books that were commissioned by CIA at some point about America had spread, had an impact. It's not clear how much, but I think the way Soviet Union kind of got undone, you know you could attribute some of that to a cultural failure of the Soviet system and awareness that the American way of life was attractive. How much of that will be seen similar in this, in this confrontation with China? What will be the role of propaganda? I guess, in particular, whether it's good propaganda.

1:01:45 - Dmitri Alperovitch

I don't actually believe that that propaganda had much to do with the victory in the Cold War. I think that there were inherent contradictions in the Soviet system, particularly the ethnic tensions that you saw in that long telegram. His great insight was that the Soviet Union was a natural phenomena that would one day collapse, and all we had to do was wait them out. Well, China is not collapsing. China is not going anywhere. It's been around for five thousand years. It may be around for another five thousand years. The Communist Party may live for a very long time. As much as it disdains us, there's nothing we can do about that. So the goal is not the disintegration of China, and I don't even define the victory as the fall of the CCP, because if you define victory in that way, as some do, you may never have that victory. You may not have it for hundreds of years, right, because there's nothing you can do to affect that. And in fact you create more antagonism because they now see this as an existential conflict between you and them, because you're trying to dislodge them from power. So ultimately, I think it's up to the Chinese people to decide what system they want to live under. Again, like. We don't have to tell them about the brutality of the communist regime. They know it very well. We don't have to tell them about the attractiveness of our system. They know that very well too, which is why you have 4,000 Chinese coming across our border every single month. Again, I don't welcome that necessarily, because we do need secure borders, but it does speak to the attractiveness of our system versus theirs. And what I think we need to do is again focus on deterring conflict, focus on making sure that Taiwan's status quo as this autonomous effectively nation, remains, and then we can wait China out, not necessarily for collapse, but for the degradation of their economic advantages.

You're already starting to see that. Their real economic growth is probably around two and a half percent, maybe three at the most, which is very on par with ours, and of course, our economy is 25% bigger. So at that rate they'll never catch up with us. And that's before you even take into account the dramatic demographics changes that they're going to go under over the coming decades, particularly in the late 30s, 40s, 50s. Today, very conservative projections state that they'll be at 550 million by the end of the century, a dramatic collapse in population that you've never seen in world history. That will inevitably erode their economic power and their, as a result, their military power. So it will allow us to go back to this uneasy competition that we've had with them for the last 45 years, where it is not existential, where we're not planning to go to war, but we're still the dominant economic and military power, and that's fine, right. It would be nice if the CCP collapses, but I'm not holding my breath for that.

1:05:11 - Alex Shevelenko

I love it because what you're fundamentally saying is the old truism in international relations that the opposite of war is not peace, the opposite of war is no war.

And what your book and if you don't mind I'll just give it another plug here. World on the Brink: How Can America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century. Your book, Dmitri, actually highlights that we have a path and it's very important to get it right in the next few years to prevent the most risky element of where we could have a war was, you know, lots of human suffering. And so I hope all of you who are interested in both getting excited about what's great inside America. You know your book is written by somebody who is, who is a fan. You could see and kind of work on those strengths and build up those strengths and also be aware of the world you know, new, changing world that we live in, take the right lessons from the past. So I really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us, Dmitri. Anything else people that are interested can do other than buying your book?

1:06:28 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Yeah, check out my book on Amazon or wherever you buy books. Also, check out my podcast, Geopolitics Decanted, where we dive into those issues on a roughly biweekly basis and cover conflicts like Ukraine, like issues in Taiwan and elsewhere.

1:06:46 - Alex Shevelenko

So we didn't get into the solution to the problem in Ukraine, but I'm sure we could discover that on the podcast.

1:06:53 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Yeah, that's a really tough one.

1:06:54 - Alex Shevelenko

That's a tough one.

1:06:56 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Things are not going well there.

1:06:59 - Alex Shevelenko

And this is another reminder of why it's really important to avoid conflict. I think that's fundamentally what you're trying to do with the book when you're going into that direct escalation. The peace process out of a war is way more complex and difficult than avoiding the war and again I hope everybody gets a chance to read the book and support the policy decisions that drive that. Thanks so much for joining us, Dmitri!

1:07:25 - Dmitri Alperovitch

Thank you!