President Alexander Stubb: A Changing World Order, Democracies Facing AI, and Golfing with Trump

Alexander Stubb (0:00)

Democracies have not been able to cope with social media and with modern technology yet, and they're losing the struggle. We also see big tech companies in many ways being more powerful than states. So you can ask the question, is Anthropic or is Facebook more powerful than Norway and Finland?

Nicolai Tangen (0:30)

Hi, everyone. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, and today I'm in really good company with Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland. Finland has 5.5 million people, a 1,340-kilometer border with Russia, one of the happiest countries in the world, nine years in a row.

It punches far about its weight, and so does President Stubb. When Europe needs a way through to the White House, Alexander is often the one who gets the call.

Earlier this year, Alexander wrote a book about how the old world fell apart, and who decides what comes next. I've really been looking forward to this. Alexander, be welcome.

Alexander Stubb (1:09)

Nice to be with you, Nicolai.

Nicolai Tangen (1:11)

In short, what's the most important message in your book?

Alexander Stubb (1:16)

The most important message is that the world order is changing, much like it changed in 1918, 1945 and 1989 And the ones that are going to decide what it looks like is going to be the Global South and the choices between multilateral norms-based institutional order and corporation versus multipolar transactional chaos and conflict.

Nicolai Tangen (1:41)

Why is the South going to decide the future?

Alexander Stubb (1:44)

Because they basically have the size and scale to do that in terms of population, economy and technology. So the end of Western dominance is over.

But I don't think the East is going to dominate either. So we're going to start getting a whole bunch of new players. And my vested interest coming from a small country is that it would be a multilateral system based on the UN. But that means that the UN has to be reformed so that the South has agency in it.

Nicolai Tangen (2:15)

The African leaders say that we in Europe, we just come and wag the finger whilst the Chinese come with the capital. Are you, is that a worry for you that the Chinese influence in the South?

Alexander Stubb (2:26)

Yeah, I mean, definitely the Chinese have played the long strategic game much better than we Europeans. You know, the good old saying goes that a Western leader came to an African country, landed at an airport which was built by the Chinese, drove down a highway which was built by the Chinese, and then gave a press conference in a hotel built by the Chinese, saying that you should not be cooperating with the Chinese. And I think that's sometimes the mentality. So my take is that we need a more dignified foreign policy. We need to be more humble. We need to wag the finger a little bit less and do a little bit more concrete cooperation.

Nicolai Tangen (3:04)

You say that the West mistakes wasn't bad intent. It's just that we just saw the world through our own eyes. So what did we get wrong?

Alexander Stubb (3:13)

Well, I think it's quite normal. I mean, we're all prisoners of our own identity. I mean, you and I are Scandinavians or Nordics. We're Europeans. We're very Western oriented. And we've been born or at least had our professional life in sort of a post Cold War order. So that sort of skews what we think about the world and what we now have to understand that in order for you to be able to survive in this new world, you need to change. What we got wrong was this sort of innate arrogance that history ended and the West would kind of dominate and everyone would follow. And that's not the case anymore. You look at the Gulf States, which are extremely prosperous. You look at India, which is now the most populated country in the world. You look at some of the big players in Africa, like Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt. You look at Brazil and Argentina and suddenly you realize that it's not the West that dominates anymore. And of course, an additional spice to this comes with the new US administration, which has quite a different approach to multilateralism than many of us in the West in general.

Nicolai Tangen (4:17)

And some additional spice from the Fourth Power. And you and Mark Carney wrote this summer that we now have this fourth group incoming technology block built on compute, data and AI. And so how is this going to pan out?

Is that now the most powerful of the four, you think?