No Statecraft for Old Men: Jack Watling on the New Rules of Power in a Chaotic World

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. There seems to be new rules in our 21st century world when it comes to the great powers and the other powers. A few days ago, Ukraine hit St. Petersburg with some drones to ruin one of Vladimir Putin's favorite occasions. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is hitting his limits, at least according to the New York Times, in Iran the Straits of Hormuz. He wants to call the shots, but he's not doing it. Both sides are claiming victory. They both demand victory. But of course, the US is supposed to be the greatest power in the world, whereas Iran is anything but a superpower. And yet, there's a stalemate there. And Israel has launched new strikes in southern Lebanon, seems to do it every week. New strikes, was trying to wipe out Hezbollah, never managing to do so. So these new rules speak of perhaps a very different kind of world order, which my guest today, Jack Watling, a strategy expert based in London, outlines in his new book, Statecraft, The New Rules of Power in a Divided World. Jack is joining us from the Royal United Services Institute on Whitehall, the Center of British Imperial Power, what was once British Imperial Power in London. Jack, congratulations on the new book.
These new rules that you talk about, are they really new? Isn't really the history of the world that there've always been many different powers and they've manifested it in different ways?

**Jack Watling** (2:12)
Well, firstly, thank you very much for having me on. It's good to be with you. And you're correct. As a historian, many of these principles are old, but they are new to the current crop of political leaders that we have, because we were in a world, I think, in which it was largely monopolar, i.e. the United States was, as you said, had primacy. And politicians viewed the world as either developing on a linear trend of progress. We were working to cure polio, for example, or eradicate it, and other diseases or to develop societies through economic investments. Or we had periodic crises like terrorism, where we needed to intervene and essentially resolve the problem so that we could return to the status quo.
And now we are entering a period of intense interstate competition where you don't necessarily return to the status quo, because the changes, the interventions that are being made fundamentally change the trend.
And that does require a new way of thinking among our leaders.

**Andrew Keen** (3:17)
Are our leaders capable of a new way of thinking, come thinking of Trump? Certainly, I'm not sure whether he thinks at all. Certainly not in a new way. And of course, Putin is rather similar. Are these guys trapped in some sort of old world fantasy of their super power them?

**Jack Watling** (3:37)
Well, I mean, to speak of Putin, he has essentially tried to rebuild not the Soviet Union, but rather a Orthodox Holy Russian Empire and has grounded his ideology of states in long past Russian history, which he cares about deeply. And his anchoring of his current policy in the deep past is a challenge because it means that when you end up in negotiations as Trump found in Alaska, he's not a pragmatic dealmaker. Instead, he starts referring back to the history from the 800s.
And so, yes, I think that does make it difficult to shift Putin's thinking about his objectives and how he sees the world. Because he's essentially locked himself in to a rubric of looking at the world, which doesn't really align with how anyone else reads the map. I think Trump is very different. I think Trump is much less cautious, much more impulsive, actually quite skilled at making the conversation one that occurs on the terms that interest him, because he will disrupt things in a way that makes everyone else anxious and uncomfortable and unsure of what's going to happen next. The problem with being impulsive rather than deliberate is that he will break the rubric or trend but not have a clear idea of where he wants to get it to or how to do so. And so I think he becomes trapped as events around him accelerate, which is what's happened in Iran.
And he suddenly finds that he doesn't have all of the tools he needs to solve the problem. So I think they're different characters, but both of them are very clearly fallible.

**Andrew Keen** (5:34)
Certainly the fallibility of both Trump and Putin is self-evident. We live, Jack, you don't need me to tell you this, in a rather pessimistic age.