Interview with Kevin Rudd

**Zachary Karabell** (0:05)
What Could Go Right? For this episode, we are talking to Kevin Michael Rudd. Kevin Rudd is formerly Australia's Prime Minister. He was Prime Minister from 2007, the very end of 2007 to 2010, and then for a brief period in 2013 He was born in Queensland. He has a degree in Chinese Studies from ANU, Australian National University. He worked as a diplomat in China, and then he went to the House of Representatives in Australia in 1998, and eventually became leader of the Labour Party, and then Prime Minister and was also Foreign Secretary. He's currently living in the United States, in New York. He is the inaugural president of the Asia Society's Policy Institute, which does a lot of Asia Society's policy work, as it expresses. And he travels around the world still offering his counsel and insight to politicians, business leaders, thinkers, intellectuals, you name it, because he has this unique view of the world coming from Australia, having spent a lot of time in China, living in the United States. And by virtue of that and by virtue of the fact that he is interesting, insightful individual, brings a certain perspective to bear on the questions of what is going on in the world today? What is going on with liberal democracy, with capitalism, with this triad that I've talked about before? Is this going to be the foundational basis, liberalism, democracy, capitalism, for prosperity going forward? Is there going to be a Chinese model that is different and works and becomes exportable beyond the borders of China? Will our own notions of democracy and liberalism change in ways that are constructive or ways that are destructive? Is the world better off or worse off from the changing role of the United States? All of these questions and more, we will delve into now.
Kevin Rudd, so we are speaking, you are currently in Australia, I'm sure you will be in a completely different place by the time this discussion airs, but there's an interesting question that I've had with some people about how does the world change depending on where you are and where you're sitting. And this is always a challenge, right? That the world as you see it is framed by your own cultural context, your own geographical context. And if you're in the Western world now, there's a particular perspective about what's going on in Asia and globally. And if you're in Asia now, there's a particular perspective about what's going on in the West and globally. And Australia, even though you now split your time and spend a considerable amount of time in New York, Australia is its own beast, right? In the way in which you're able to observe all of these patterns. So sitting where you are, what's the view of the world? Are we all kind of heading to hell in a hand basket? Is this current dyspeptic, dystopian moment justified? Or is it a more complicated picture and we're missing something?

**Kevin Rudd** (3:13)
I think dystopia in general has become far too fashionable to in fact be realistic. And the world has been through convulsions in the past, huge convulsions, and we're going through another range of convulsions now. But it doesn't mean that we can't navigate our way through. Your broader point about how we perceive reality from where we sit in the world is an important one. Of course, all of us suffer from the illusion or the delusion that wherever we happen to sit, it constitutes the objective epicenter of reason, and everyone else is simply some crazed mad bastard. It's not quite like that. We simply have different perspectives. The only advantage I bring in terms of how I view what's happening in the world today is having lived in America now for the last three or four years, and having lived previously in China as a diplomat some decades ago, and also being an Australian is that over a period of time, you do look at the same reality through different lenses. And so what I see, however, is an emerging huge gap between the Chinese perception of, let's call it, emerging realities, and how America perceives those same realities. And that's where the gap is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And frankly, those of us who try to occupy a space in between those two realities are finding less and less safe ground to stand on.

**Zachary Karabell** (4:43)
It's an interesting question, though, right? There's never been a safe, liminal zone in politics or in political perspectives. So, well, it's an honorable space to try to occupy.
That's sort of the on the one hand, on the other hand space of, hey, wait a minute, there's another way of looking at this. And obviously, I've been trying to occupy that space myself in various ways for a long period of time. It's not really a space that's occupied. It is, in fact, a gap where only a few people like to hang out because it doesn't have clear delineations and clear lines and clear attitudes. And everyone wants to know which one is right. In this China-U.S. emerging, they see the world from one perspective, we see it from another. Is there a way to bridge that gap other than you trying to occupy it and trying to bridge it?