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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our election series, 30 Issues in 30 Days. It's Issue 12, America's Place in a Post-Pandemic World: How Different Would Trump and Biden Be? With me for this is Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post columnist and host of CNN's weekly global affairs program, Fareed Zakaria GPS, Sundays at 10:00 AM Eastern Time. Fareed has a new book called Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. Fareed, always a pleasure. Welcome back to WNYC.

Fareed Zakaria: It's my pleasure to be here, Brian.

Brian: I'll say even the title of your book gives us a little hope because it assumes that there will be a post-pandemic world. I'll just note that there was a little smile that came across my face when I read Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. To start in the present, you look around the world at countries that have been more successful or less successful at containing the virus, and you conclude that it's not democracy versus dictatorship that seems to predict it. Why aren't those relevant and what is?

Fareed: It's fascinating actually to look at that question because it's almost like we've had a controlled social science experiment. I was able to take a quick look at the early results. You're tempted to think it's dictatorships because you think, "Oh, the Chinese can do these lockdowns and you're able to force people to share data," but it turns out that the countries that handled COVID best were actually very democratic. Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand, Germany. It also turns out that the left-right divide doesn't help you very much, there were left-wing governments that did it, right-wing governments.

What really mattered was not the quantity of government, not big state versus small state, which is what we tend to obsess over, but the quality of government. What you notice is places like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, which actually have very small governments in terms of government spending as a percentage of GDP, did superbly. Why? Because they have lean, efficient governments, have a great deal of social trust, so when the government tells you do social distancing, they do social distancing, but perhaps the most important thing, Brian, and this is the contrast with America, they learned from their mistakes.

They are humble enough to look around the world whenever they face a problem and say, "What can we learn from somebody who's doing this better? What did we do wrong the last time?" Most of them went through a bad experience with SARS, and they didn't handle it very well, but they revamped their healthcare systems in response. Now, contrast that with the United States, where I think we have gotten arrogant, and we have allowed this idea of American exceptionalism to make it so that we don't actually learn very much from the world. We assume that our way is the best, that everybody else is doing something wrong.

It's not just us, by the way. The other country that has this exceptionalist mindset is

Great Britain. They've also done very badly. If you ask people in Latin America what country thinks they're special in Latin America, people will tell you Brazil, and Brazil has done very badly. There is, at some level, maybe the humility to learn and learn from your failures is probably the single most important trait of success.

Brian: Do you ever ask yourself about the alternative history here regarding the US? What if Hillary Clinton had become president and the virus had struck, what would be different?

Fareed: I do think it would be quite different. Look, there are some failures here that go beyond Trump. The CDC sent out faulty kits and that was not Trump's fault, the FDA was never able to approve private labs to do tests the way it should have, the Department of Health and Human Services was not able to put together a national test, but if you look at previous experiences, the Obama administration's experience with Ebola, the way I would put it is this. American government is very difficult, because you have power divided among three branches and dozens of agencies, you have disaggregation.

Then actually it's the states and not even the states, but it's the localities. I think the number is something like 3,000 or 4,000 different administrative units of local government that have to make these decisions, but what people understand in Washington is if you have a president who is focused, dedicated, and committed, you can corral these various governments together. You can drive a consistent policy through, but it's very hard. You have to act early, aggressively, and intelligently, and maybe fundamentally, Brian, you have to believe in government.

The problem we have is that you have a Republican party under Trump that believes its principle goal is to deconstruct the administrative state. Those were Steve Bannon's words when he was Trump's chief strategist and advisor. "Our goal," he said, "is to deconstruct the state." You have people like Grover Norquist who have had this huge influence on the Republican party who says, "Our goal, our agenda is to diminish government so much that it is so small that I can drag it into my bathtub and drown it." Now, if you are trying to destroy the American government, well guess what, when the pandemic comes, it's not going to function very well.

Brian: Reaganism lives, and people say there's such a distinction between Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan.

Fareed: Yes. I think that in a very important respect, what Reagan did, which was to discredit the federal government, to discredit government in general, has lived through this long period. Now, there's a very complicated set of reasons why. I think that one of the things that has happened is that the small government libertarian wing of the party, if you will, the Koch brothers, have made an alliance with the social conservatives, but the one thing they can all agree on is, let's deconstruct the state, let's demonize it, let's make it sound like the font of all your problems because it distracts from the fact that maybe you need higher taxes. Maybe you need to fund these departments better. Maybe you need a more assertive, aggressive role.

Reagan used to say the, what is it, the nine most famous words in the English

language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Well, I think a lot of people who have gone through this pandemic would not think that that's funny. They need government support. One of the things I talk about in the book is the dramatic widening of inequality that has taken place in this pandemic, much, much worse. I think most people don't realize, compared to the global financial crisis, the effects of the pandemic have been to massively exacerbate inequality in America.

Brian: I thought that was the most ominous of your 10 lessons, that you predict that inequality will get worse, and in the current context, you tie that to different countries' healthcare systems in the pandemic. Would you elaborate on that part?

Fareed: Sure. First, so people understand just how difficult the situation we're in, if you look at the jobs loss for the top 25% and the bottom 25%, and you look at the last four or five recessions, basically, the top 25% and the bottom 25% lose about the same amount of job- there's about the same amount of job loss. This time, I think the bottom 25% are losing five times as much as the top 25%. It's a huge difference. We can feel it. You and I, Brian, are able to continue to do our jobs, but there are so many people at the lower end of the scale, the most vulnerable, who are being just destroyed by this pandemic.

Then you take a look at what's happening to corporate America, where the big, big brands that have digital capacity, that have national brands are all doing well. The mom-and-pops have had to close. Think about the restaurant closures. These are all mom-and-pop restaurants. In every respect, you're seeing that. Then you come to healthcare, where the American system is unique in that our healthcare system maximizes heroic interventions for rich people, or for people who are old. It's a very peculiar system, but the one thing it does very badly is provide routine preventive care for everyone, particularly for poor people.

It turns out in a pandemic, that's what you need. Our healthcare system is not as bad as it looks in the pandemic. It's actually a mixed system with some great strengths, but the greatest weakness of our healthcare system, the inequality, the lack of access turns out to be very dangerous in a pandemic when no one is safe unless everyone is safe and tested and under some kind of monitoring.

Brian: How much do you see the US at a healthcare crossroads in this election?

Fareed: I hope that the US is at a crossroads more generally. I hope that the United States is at the kind of crossroads where we've realized that we are facing these challenges that are much larger than anything we've really faced before. Just look at climate change. You look at California burning. You look at the droughts. You look at the hurricanes. You look at these pandemics, that are in large part being caused because of human development and the way in which we are interacting more and more with wild animals. You look at the way we have been unable to respond.

I hope it's a wake-up call, and it makes us recognize that we need an effective government. It's not a question of being big or small. I think in that context, I'm hoping that there is a wake-up call for healthcare, but we need to do more than

healthcare. For example, we cannot keep subsidizing people to live right on the coastlines, right on the edges of forests, with all the dangers and risks that involves, which we see in California.

I feel as though, I write in the book that we're driving a fast race car. We don't have seatbelts on, we don't bother to buy insurance. We notice a few things keep heating up. The engine blows up, we patch it up, and we go back. We need something more systemic. We really need a more resilient system and that does involve crucially, government. I think we have to unwind the Reagan mentality, the government is simply a word for what we can do collectively and effectively.

Brian: Listeners we're in Issue 12 of our election series, 30 Issues in 30 days, it's America's place in a post-pandemic world. Our guests for this is CNN's Fareed Zakaria, who's also a Washington Post columnist and has a new book called Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. When we continue in a minute, we're going to get to, what I think is one of the most interesting of the 10, that the world is now polarized between the United States and China, and the implications of that. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Fareed Zakaria whose new book is Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. One of your 10 lessons is that the world is polarized between the United States and China, which might not come as news to a lot of people, but to set the scene for this and what it means, you establish that the distinguishing feature of a bipolar world is that the top two powers are miles ahead of all the others, in what most important ways is that true of the US and China?

Fareed: Brian, it's a great question because that surprised me when I started to research for the book and tried to make sense of what is the international system we are living in right now? What I realized is if you went back to 1946, when the great scholar, Hans Morgenthau, invented the term bipolarity or bipolar world, he said the distinguishing characteristic is that the top two have to be miles ahead of everyone else. He was pointing out at that time 1946, Britain had just collapsed as a great power and leaving the United States and the Soviet Union.

If you look today, the United States is clearly number one still, by every measure, but China is number two on every measure. The most important and most, to me, surprising fact was the Chinese economy is now larger than the next four economies put together. That is, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, so that was a surprise to me. Then I looked at military spending where I assumed again that the Russia would still be competitive. China's defense spending is number two in the world, and it is larger than the next four militaries put together.

We are properly now in a new bipolar world in which these two powers are utterly dominant, and China has all kinds of problems. I'm not trying to suggest it doesn't, but it is not a laggard in most respects. Take computing power for example. Of the 500 fastest computers in the world, something like 250 are in China, which is twice as many as in the United States.

In that kind of world, we are going to have to figure out how we want to navigate. I don't think we have an option, and I think many Americans and certainly you sometimes get the feeling that Donald Trump thinks he can stop China from growing. He can crush it. He can destroy it. I don't think that option exists anymore. What we have to ask ourselves is, how do we want to navigate this world? There is going to be an element of competition between the United States and China.

That is inevitable, that is possibly healthy, but in any event it's inevitable, but I think we also have to ask ourselves don't we want to find ways to talk and collaborate with the second largest economy in the world on problems like climate change? If we don't collaborate with China on climate change, the world is going to get much less safe.

Brian: Trump argues that if Biden is elected, China will eat our lunch more than ever before, but realistically, how do you see Trump and Biden being different or similar on policy in a post-pandemic world with respect to China, especially the economic challenges?

Fareed: On the economic challenge from China, Trump is fundamentally wrong, as he has been on trade for his entire life. He began his entry into public life in 1985, when as a real estate developer, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, and he's cheap so he must have really cared passionately about this. The entire ad was about how Japan was going to take over the world because of its predatory trade practices, and if we didn't get smart, we were all going to be working for the Japanese and speaking Japanese. I'm exaggerating but that was the-

Brian: A lot of people thought that in 1985, didn't they?

Fareed: Absolutely and frankly, they were all wrong. What it turned out is, first of all, straight lines don't go on forever. Trees don't grow to the skies. In other words, there's a point at which fast-growing countries hit their own natural peaks. Secondly, would be the United States was more than able to compete in a world with Japan. For all the reasons that he was wrong about Japan, he's wrong about China.

Let me give you the best evidence of this, whatever China is doing, and by the way they did do some shenanigans on freight. I don't deny that at all, and by the way, so do we, we have huge agricultural subsidies. We provide huge kinds of hidden subsidies to companies like Boeing, but be that as it may, under Donald Trump, the American trade deficit has gone up every month. Today, the day we are speaking, the USTR put out the new figure. We are now at an all-time high for the trade deficit.

Donald Trump told us that his trade policy would result in a disappearance of the trade deficit. In fact, what has happened is it had gone to enormous heights. Why is that? Because we are living in a complex global economy where Americans, who are 5% of the population, but 25% of the economy, buy stuff, we drive up the trade deficit . The more we buy, the more we drive it up, it has much less to do with predatory trade practices. I know this gets into the weeds, but my point is on his own measure, he has been completely wrong.

I think Biden will have a more sensible, more sober China policy. One, as I say, that will have elements of competition and we have to push back on some of the stuff they do that is predatory trade practices, but there also has to be an element of cooperation. Look, we don't want to have the world's two largest economies go down a path of relentless competition and downward spirals, a space war, a nuclear arms race, cyber-attacks, not to mention whatever could happen with climate change. That is not an attractive picture of the future.

Bipolarity is inevitable, but if we go down the path of a second Cold War, that will be our choice, and will not be one that will make the average American more secure or more prosperous.

Brian: Another of your 10 lessons that's related is that globalization is not dead, but rejection of globalization has been a centerpiece of the Trump project, as you know, be it on immigration, international treaties, on trade, or the environment, or whatever, the message there is that other countries are getting over on us, but globalization is being rejected by the left as represented by Bernie Sanders and others, emphasizing more of the giant corporations are getting over on us. How do you see the globalization of the future and the American worker in that context?

Fareed: I think that one of the things in writing this book that I really recognized was the power of being able to look at complicated problems and have simple solutions that blame other people. That is fundamentally what Trump has done. He has looked at the complexity of living in a globalized world, and subconsciously or consciously, he just says, it's all-- if you think about 2016, his basic campaign slogan was you, and he's pointing to his base and he said, "Your lives suck and the reason they suck is because the Chinese have taken your factories, the Mexicans have taken your job, and the Muslims are trying to kill you." That was basically the appeal.

As you say, on the left, there is a much less vitriolic and emotional version of this, but there is some skepticism about trade for those reasons, but look, here's what I would say, Brian. It is inevitable. We are living in a complicated interconnected world which we cannot unwind. People don't want to unwind, we have 5% of the global population, we need to sell to other people. We need the investments that come in from other people.

The reason the American economy has been able to be somewhat stable in this period of extraordinary dislocation is because people still invest in the United States. They still buy our debt. Our companies are still able to sell abroad. Those realities continue to exist. By the way, for the poorest of Americans, the biggest benefit of globalization is that the cost of food and the cost of clothing have gone down in ways that would be unimaginable. These are huge tax cuts for people.

They don't affect people on the operating income scale as much. Somebody would be willing to pay $1 or $2 for a bunch of bananas, but when you can reduce food costs by 30% for a family that's living on $20,000, $25,000 a year, that is a huge benefit, but it's easy to demonize.

We will have this yin-yang, where in my view, globalization is inevitable. We will

continue to do. There will be some modifications. People will try to fight the last war. We'll try to have some mask production in the United States. Now, of course, the next challenge we face might have nothing to do with masks, but there's going to be some of that. You can't unwind a system in which the world is as deeply connected as it is now.

Let me give you one example. The Soviet Union and the United States, at the height of the Cold War did $2 billion of trade a year. The United States and China do $2 billion of trade every day. That's the new world we're in. You can imagine something else, but it's not going to happen.

Brian: The last thing on this, you refer to what is maybe our basic economic bargain in global terms as Americans, which is to trade lower wages, to accept lower wages in exchange for lower prices, with what you were describing before. It's made a lot of Americans unhappy. It just isn't working for a lot of people. Maybe it's working for a lot of people as well, because of the cheap food prices that you're talking about and things like that, but for a lot of people, it isn't working. What do you see is possible, in terms of managing globalization better, from the perspective of halting American middle-class decline?

Fareed: You're absolutely right. That is the dilemma. The way I would put it is this, and I talk about this in the book. We have a solution to this that we have historically had. Historically, what has tended to happen is that you accept the tradeoff you're describing, but then wages start to rise because a country like the United States, the more advanced country, tends to produce higher and higher value-added goods.

We go out of agriculture and we go into factories, and went out from factories, we go into service jobs, and from service jobs, we go into post-industrial jobs. Those wages tend to get higher. The problem is that the pandemic and the world is-- the pandemic has accelerated this, but the world is going on steroids, where these divisions are moving faster and faster.

Obama actually gave a speech about this once. He said, "Look, we all understand the benefits of free trade. We all understand that there is dislocation for some people whose wages get lower. We all say the government needs to step in and help those people, and give them relief, and give them retraining, give them reeducation, and then we never do it." That's the secret. When you look at Germany, they have been able to maintain a more stable relationship with globalization than we have.

By the way, Germany is much more globalized than the United States. The US economy is 85% domestic economy, Germany is only 50%. 50% of Germany's economy is trade. The reason they have been able to maintain it is because they spend 20 times what we spend on retraining programs, per capita. I actually had this conversation with some of the Trump people, where they were saying they wanted to do retraining. I said, "Please, don't embrace the Republican fantasy, that you can do these things without spending money."

The Germans may be doing clever things on the side, but the single biggest

difference between German retraining programs and American retraining programs is, they spend a lot of money on it. There is no free lunch here. We have to recognize that if we are going to exist in this kind of open world, our people, what I call it in the book, as I said, we need to be open, but armed. We have to arm our people with training, with safety nets, and things like that.

Brian: That's huge. We should do a show on just that, that German-American comparison. We have one minute left. I need a real one-minute answer, but I don't want to exclude one of your 10 lessons that I think really relates to 2020. That the greatest realists sometimes are the idealists. Which idealists of 2020 do you have in mind?

Fareed: Look, I think Biden is much closer to the tradition that I'm describing in that lesson. The idealism that America used when it built the United Nations, when it engaged with the world, when it built the World Health Organization, when it built UNICEF. There is a great legacy of American idealism that has transformed the world. That's why I call it realism. It really did change the world. We have had 75 years of peace. I hope, going into 2021, we will see a recovery of that kind of American idealism, both for our own safety, and because it will create a better world.

Brian: Next Wednesday, folks, October 14th, at six o'clock Eastern, you can join Fareed Zakaria and former US ambassador, Samantha Power, for a livestream, virtual book discussion of Fareed's new book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. That event will be hosted by P&P Live, a virtual book channel of Politics and Prose Bookstore, Fareed Zakaria and Samantha Power, a week from Wednesday, October 14th, at 6:00 PM, Eastern. Fareed, thanks as always, really great to have you.

Fareed: It's a pleasure, Brian, and really this show, there's nothing like it. It's so smart. It's an honor to be on. Thank you so much.

Brian: I'm honored to have you say that.

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