00:00:02:12 - 00:00:35:12

Speaker 1

Okay. Good. Welcome to the 2026 Bernard Brodie Lecture on the Conditions of Peace. I'm Kal Raustiala. I direct the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, and we have been running this lecture, the Bernard Brodie Lecture, for over four decades. Past speakers include President Jimmy Carter, UN Secretary general Ban Ki moon, former Finnish prime minister Sarin Marin. We've also had several former ambassadors U.S. Ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul, U.S. Ambassador to Germany John Emerson.

00:00:35:12 - 00:00:56:19

Speaker 1

And last year, our speaker was the former president and prime minister of Armenia, Armen Sarkisian. This year, I'm really proud to welcome back to UCLA. And I'll get to that in a second. Someone who's been here many times before. I think he is the rare and possibly the unique Brody lecturer to actually be a native Angeleno, possibly our first.

00:00:56:21 - 00:01:14:01

Speaker 1

Eric Garcetti served as the mayor of Los Angeles and most recently as U.S. ambassador to India. I'm going to give him a full introduction in a moment. But first, I'm just going to tell you a little bit about how the rest of the afternoon will unfold. So once I introduce Ambassador Garcetti, he's going to come up here, give some remarks.

00:01:14:01 - 00:01:33:17

Speaker 1

20 minutes, 25 minutes, something like that. He and I will then sit in those two chairs. We'll have a brief conversation about a host of topics. I have no idea exactly what he's going to say. His title was cryptic and encompassing, so I'm open for all sorts of things. We'll then open up to questions from all of you.

00:01:33:18 - 00:02:06:23

Speaker 1

We do have hand-held microphones, so please wait to be called on. Obviously raise your hand. I will call on you when you get the microphone. Most importantly, please keep your questions short and to the point. There is only one roadie lecture today and it's Eric Garcetti. So let me introduce our speaker. Eric Michael Garcetti currently serves as ambassador for Global Climate Diplomacy for C40 cities, where he advanced his climate cooperation among the world's major cities, states and regions from 2320 23 to 2025.

00:02:07:00 - 00:02:39:22

Speaker 1

He served as the American ambassador to India, leading one of our nation's largest diplomatic missions, building closer ties between the world's two largest democracies, and, most famously, dancing the Tabatabai. Garcetti previously served 12 years on the L.A. City Council. Just look that video up if you don't know what I'm talking about. Garcetti previously served 12 years on the city council before, before being elected in 2013 as the youngest mayor in the history of the city of LA, and was reelected in 2017 by a record margin.

00:02:40:00 - 00:03:00:21

Speaker 1

In 2019, he joined as chair of the C40 cities, a coalition of 100 of the world's leading cities committed to climate action. In addition, he serves on the board of the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Global Diplomacy Council of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. For many years, he taught international relations at Occidental College right here in LA.

00:03:01:01 - 00:03:19:13

Speaker 1

He's a former US Navy intelligence officer. He holds a B.A. and an Ma from Columbia University, studied as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford and at LSK. Most importantly, Ambassador Garcetti is a graduate of UCLA of the UCLA Elementary School, where.

00:03:19:15 - 00:03:36:08

Speaker 1

I have it on good authority. He was the undisputed tetherball champion of third grade. Please join me in welcoming to UCLA Eric Garcetti.

00:03:36:10 - 00:04:00:01

Speaker 2

Well thank you. And what a joy it is to come back to where my academic career started as a four year old. I can only remember the tetherball hitting me in the face. So I think the championship is too generous. And it's wonderful to see so many of you friends that I've known throughout my life, folks that I've worked with and who have been along my side at City Hall, mentors like Xavier, who's here in the front row, and the.

00:04:00:02 - 00:04:19:03

Speaker 2

I really want to thank the center for inviting me. I think I want to thank them because six months ago when they said, you want to give this speech, I said, sure, I'm sure. You know, things are changed in the world, but what can happen in six months and literally as I speak, is when the deadline. I know it's been extended, but the deadline of the cease fire was to occur.

00:04:19:06 - 00:04:37:13

Speaker 2

I bet no other Brody lecture has given a real time conditions of peace speech. So I thought we'd just do it together, and you can kind of pull your right ear lobe if we're at war or left. If the peace is holding to. Just give me a hint. But let me jump in and give some thank yous later.

00:04:37:15 - 00:05:05:08

Speaker 2

In the force of Kabbalah National Park in Uganda, scientists some of you might have read about this recently, have spent 30 years watching a community of chimpanzees, 200 of them moving through the forest and small bands, grooming each other, hunting together, acting as one family. But then a little bit over a decade ago, in June of 2015, something changed and two bands met on a hillside.

00:05:05:08 - 00:05:35:02

Speaker 2

And as one researcher put it, quote, all hell broke loose. What followed was not a momentary flare of aggression, but the beginning of a war, the bloodiest ever recorded among chimpanzees in history 28 deaths, a majority of them children over a decade of active warfare, and two subcommunities that had been part of a single family turned on each other with a ferocity that surprised the scientists watching them.

00:05:35:04 - 00:06:12:14

Speaker 2

What caused it? Well, five adult males died the year before, probably from disease. And these weren't just any five individuals. They were the social bridges chimpanzees whose relationships spanned different clusters within the group and who collectively held the community together through accumulated bonds of trust. And when they died, those bridges also crumbled. Low level tensions that had always existed had nothing to hold them in check all of a sudden, said one researcher, yesterday's friend became today's foe, you know.

00:06:12:16 - 00:06:37:19

Speaker 2

One of the scientists offered a reflection on what the research means that caring for social bonds can counter violence, if that's the case. 6 million years ago, we split off from our closest ancestors, but still hold 99% of the same DNA. And if that case holds, the conflict, management in our own lives becomes a local responsibility, a civic duty.

00:06:37:19 - 00:06:54:06

Speaker 2

If we are to bring about a more peaceful world, a local and civic duty. That phrase is at the heart of what I want to share with you today. And it's funny you talked about the cryptic title. When you're saying yes to something, you offer a title long before you know what you're going to say, but I think it'll come back around.

00:06:54:08 - 00:07:12:04

Speaker 2

You know, Bernard Brodie, I don't know if many of you know, but I brought his book actually here today. He was one of the great intellects of our world, and certainly at UCLA. This is a tough book to get. I bought one paperback version of this then in downtown LA, had my car broken into on the way to the airport, and it was stolen.

00:07:12:04 - 00:07:35:08

Speaker 2

Everything else was covered by insurance, but I'm like, I can't get this book again. Took me another month just to find one. But War and Politics and the other books he wrote really were seminal works in the postwar era about talking about peace. And he spent his career asking a question that sounds simple, but it is not what makes peace possible.

00:07:35:10 - 00:08:04:23

Speaker 2

Not peace is the absence of war, as others had written, but peace as a condition, a set of arrangements, habits, institutions, and calculations that make catastrophic conflict less likely and human flourishing more possible. He understood that peace is not natural. It's constructed and like all constructed things, that requires maintenance, adaptation. And when the structure begins to fail, the courage to rebuild rather than simply mourn.

00:08:05:00 - 00:08:31:19

Speaker 2

Brodie also understood that military power, divorced from coherent political purpose, sound familiar produces what he called strategic absurdity. You win the battle, but you lose the war. You achieve your tactical objective, but generate a catastrophe more dangerous than the problem you set out to solve. Today, before you, I come to Brodie's question from three vantage points. First is a scholar of international relations.

00:08:31:21 - 00:09:03:12

Speaker 2

Second is a council member and mayor for over 21.5 years who built international architecture from city halls on climate, migration, resilience, gender equity and more. And third, from my experience as your ambassador to India from 2023 to 2025, and from each and all of these perspectives, I've witnessed how the conditions of peace under stress in ways that are structural, not merely political, it will not be restored by any single election or any return to a previous normal.

00:09:03:17 - 00:09:31:13

Speaker 2

They must be rebuilt not just by leaders, but all of us, rebuilt more honestly, rebuilt more inclusively, and rebuilt more durably than before. Imagine for a moment that the international order that all of us in this room have lived in our lifetimes, no matter what your age, is a building. Since 1945, we've all been living in the most stable building in terms of an international order in human history.

00:09:31:14 - 00:10:03:01

Speaker 2

Well, certainly modern history. A building that was constructed atop the ashes of World War Two by people determined not to repeat the catastrophe that killed 70 million human beings. They built the United Nations, Bretton Woods, NATO, a nuclear nonproliferation regime, the international trading system and Great Power War, which had defined the previous century, did not recur. Global poverty fell more dramatically than at any point in human history.

00:10:03:03 - 00:10:32:14

Speaker 2

Now, the building wasn't Paradise, but it was, in Brody's terms, a set of conditions that made catastrophic conflict less likely and human flourishing more possible. This building, though I would offer, is a historic anomaly not just in its durability but in its singularity. For most of human history, international order has come in overlapping competing partial structures. The Roman order co-existed with the Parthian, the Han, the Gupta.

00:10:32:20 - 00:10:57:22

Speaker 2

Most generations of human beings have seen buildings of international order rise and fall in their lifetimes. But for nearly three generations, ours has stood. And sure, we've had to replace the pipes from time to time. We'd like to redecorate the interior and even been challenged, sometimes from within the building, by competing ideologies, such as during the Cold War, or from a global south who felt confined to the basement in this building.

00:10:58:00 - 00:11:38:17

Speaker 2

But even it's the most contested moments during the East-West standoffs or North-South decolonization. During the proxy war era, the building held a shared logic and stood strong. The UN Security Council still convened. Arms control negotiations still proceeded. The laws of war still nominally applied. Rivals and resisters operated from within the building. They didn't build a separate one. And what was also unusual about the post-World War II era was that a critical mass of the most economically powerful, militarily capable, disproportionately liberal nations provided sufficient weight to make this building stand.

00:11:38:19 - 00:12:16:12

Speaker 2

If you want to define the architect of that building, it wasn't post 1945. It probably started with Immanuel Kant, who argued in 1795, and the perpetual peace that peace would be constructed by three interlocking mechanisms. First, republican governance were citizens who bear the cost of war are much less likely to choose, it said. International law and institutions providing mechanisms to resolve conflicts short of violence, and then third commerce and exchange, generating a mutual dependency and therefore mutual restraint in the place of continent.

00:12:16:12 - 00:12:49:18

Speaker 2

Restraint and dependency. We now have a new age that I call the Age of Rage. Rage is all the rage these days. You see the most powerful political mobilization, the most profitable deliverer of information, the most significant social force within and between nations. But the Age of Rage is much more than an emotion. It is a felt experience of all three of those Kantian legs cracking simultaneously, and that simultaneity is what makes this moment genuinely different, at least in our lifetimes.

00:12:49:19 - 00:13:20:18

Speaker 2

First, the Republican leg cracking through disinformation, feeding parasitic off social media algorithms, and severing the connection between shared reality and democratic deliberation. Income inequality has broken the accountability loop between those who decide on war and those who bleed in it. Impatient electorates and the death of bipartisan and coalition politics have made the long term compromised. Dependent governance of Kant's republicanism required that it requires nearly impossible.

00:13:20:20 - 00:13:50:09

Speaker 2

Second, the international law leg is cracking. Not only is existing law being flouted, Russia's territorial conquest, the paralysis of the WTO, and so many more examples. But the very pipeline of new law, the process by which nations negotiate new constraints for new challenges from AI to climate, is slowed to near paralysis. We face 21st century problems with aging, 20th century legal architecture.

00:13:50:15 - 00:14:14:13

Speaker 2

And third, the trade as peace leg is cracking in ways that maybe cut deepest. We see the nationalization of trade around the world, but significantly here in the US in three different administrations, two different presidents and two different parties, both of those parties have arrived at a place where the Kantian wager on commerce is a constraint on conflict, no longer holds and is being abandoned.

00:14:14:13 - 00:14:49:17

Speaker 2

And when the largest economy in the world reaches that conclusion, it matters enormously. Now, as I said before, this building had structural problems its managers preferred not to discuss. The foundation was never universal. It encoded power asymmetries of 1945. It deferred maintenance across every major institution. And here the Ugandan forest returns. Social bridges quietly have disappeared. The people who actually lived through the Greatest Generation are physically increasingly not here, but the memories as well.

00:14:49:17 - 00:15:16:05

Speaker 2

And the social conditioning of those times are gone. So when Donald Trump, channeling some of the rage felt by global citizens today, walked by this building that we have called the international orders home and threw a molotov cocktail into the window of that building. He ignited a fire that we are witnessing today. Erecting tariffs, ignoring treaties, defunding institutions and abandoning alliances.

00:15:16:08 - 00:15:41:17

Speaker 2

The most powerful country in the world suddenly seems to be destroying everything that we built over so many years now. So many of us, the institutionalist, the practitioners inside that building, are looking at that fire and acting like firefighters and tenants, understandably rushing to put out the fire that was filled with hope and nostalgia to restore for what once was.

00:15:41:18 - 00:16:06:23

Speaker 2

But this building in which we have lived for so long that has kept the peace we somehow naively imagine it will rise again if merely we can extinguish the flames, get to another election, and replace leadership. But here's the hard truth if that political pyromaniac had never come along, the building was crumbling at its very foundations already. So it is time for us.

00:16:07:00 - 00:16:34:00

Speaker 2

And my call to arms today is to stop acting like tenants and firefighters, and to start thinking like engineers and architects and imagine what comes next. Because the moment demands that of us in this rapidly changing world, if we are to be the authors of peace, it's time to think about that post moment architecture. Brody deserves to be tested, though in reality not just honored in theory.

00:16:34:01 - 00:17:01:02

Speaker 2

Over the past 52 days, we have seen in real time what happens when Brody's warning is ignored. We've been told that the United States went to war, among other explanations against Iran, to prevent it from ever having a nuclear weapon. The military operation that ensued was, by conventional measures, quite successful, and Air force destroyed 90% of the Ron's Navy was destroyed, nuclear facilities were struck, missiles were destroyed.

00:17:01:03 - 00:17:38:03

Speaker 2

But in achieving that tactical success, we revealed something that neither Washington nor Tehran had fully understood. Iran already possessed a weapon of mass destruction. It had always possessed it. It simply hadn't known until we attacked how easy it would be to use the Strait of Hormuz. More than 20% of global seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas flows through that choke point, and Iran, even with its navy largely destroyed, can threaten passing ships with mines, missiles and cheap drones, creating such pervasive insecurity that global marine insurance markets stop providing coverage.

00:17:38:09 - 00:18:01:14

Speaker 2

The strait closed without Iran firing a single decisive shot. We set out to prevent Iran from having a weapon of mass destruction and revealed that it already had one, and this is just one living example of how the world is changing. Consider these three examples together. First, Iran, of course, discovering its weapon didn't need to be a nuclear bomb, just control of the right choke point.

00:18:01:20 - 00:18:25:09

Speaker 2

Ukraine. Discovering that a country with effectively no navy can defeat the world's third largest navy, using cheap naval drones that sank or disabled more than a third of Russia's Black Sea Fleet and forced its retreat warships costing hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, hunted by drones costing a few hundred thousand bringing about, as one analyst said, a new era in naval warfare.

00:18:25:10 - 00:18:52:10

Speaker 2

The era of the timid navy as one and China. Thirdly, is learning that chip bands from our country intention to protect us may inspire the very domestic capability that they were meant to prevent. That weaponized interdependence, when overused, just teaches the target how to escape the choke point. These are not arguments to be clear against integration. That's in my title, right?

00:18:52:12 - 00:19:18:10

Speaker 2

They are arguments for thinking more carefully about what kind of integration actually produces peace rather than leverage. And the Kantian wager I'm not going to give up on. I don't think it's wrong. It's merely incomplete today. Interdependence works when, as a peacemaker, works as a peace mechanism, when it is roughly symmetric, and when legitimate institutions exist to resolve disputes short of war and weaponization.

00:19:18:10 - 00:19:41:23

Speaker 2

But when it is asymmetric, and when those institutions themselves are weakened, as we are witnessing or even absent, the content handshake becomes a chokehold and nations are learning to avoid it. But here is where the failure of the conditions of peace actually look like. Not in a Security Council resolution or not in a diplomatic cable. Let me bring this down to the human level.

00:19:42:00 - 00:20:08:14

Speaker 2

I spent the most incredible two and a half years living in India. I dreamed of going there since my parents took me there as a 14 year old and having the chance to live there, then representing this country in what's now the second largest mission we have after our mission in Mexico and the world, I saw this incredible country, but in this moment, it is the world's second largest importer of liquefied petroleum gas, 60% of which comes through the Strait of Hormuz.

00:20:08:17 - 00:20:41:10

Speaker 2

When that strait closed, the gas stopped flowing. And in kitchens across India, the blue flame flickered. This is not a minor minor convenience for Indians. Prime Minister Modi's signature domestic achievement was a program to bring gas connections to over 330 million Indian households. That's 1.4 billion people. Families who had previously cooked over wood, scrap or cow dung. And when that flame flickered recently, people lined up for hours to buy cylinders.

00:20:41:13 - 00:21:05:00

Speaker 2

A restaurant in Bengaluru, opened since 1943, took fried items off of its menu because its kitchen had two days of gas, they didn't know if they could pay the people who worked there. Crematory struggled to operate hospital kitchens face cuts. A country of 1.4 billion people on the cusp of becoming the third largest economy reduced to asking do we have any gas today?

00:21:05:01 - 00:21:37:10

Speaker 2

This is what strategic absurdity looks like when it lands on ordinary human beings living in local communities. So where do we go from here? The future international landscape will probably not produce. I would offer a single building to replace the one we've been living in. It will demand that we construct multiple buildings overlapping partial, variously membered structures that together produce enough of the conditions of peace to prevent catastrophe.

00:21:37:12 - 00:21:56:03

Speaker 2

This is not some sort of council of despair. I know it's nice to live in a single building, and to think that you're going to pass it on to your children and your children's children. But remember, this is how international order and most of our ancestors have always lived. What was anomalous? That singularity of the post-World War II system?

00:21:56:05 - 00:22:19:00

Speaker 2

That was a one time thing, the plurality that preceded it, and that will most likely succeed. It is back to normal. Previous generations knew how to do this because they had lived through it. They had lived through order collapse. Think about the architects right after World War two. They had seen Versailles fail, a League of Nations collapse, a decade of depression and a half a decade of total war.

00:22:19:01 - 00:22:47:01

Speaker 2

We have spent our entire adult lives inside a single, unusually stable structure. So we have no literacy. We have no muscle memory. We are, in a genuine sense, institutionally naive about what building international order from rebel actually requires, which means we have to become students of order construction faster than any previous generation has had to. Let me offer you three ways to guide that work today as the collective peace builders of tomorrow.

00:22:47:03 - 00:23:08:14

Speaker 2

The good news is that the new architecture is not theoretical and some of this is already moving, already being built. Economist Richard Baldwin, in a book that came out this month, describes what is emerging from the wreckage of the US centered trading order as a multi hub solar system. He also used a metaphor of a building. He called it the Cathedral of the trade order that's coming down.

00:23:08:14 - 00:23:38:20

Speaker 2

But this multi hub solar system, which are regional trade blocs expanding and linking each other through domino regionalism, are driven not by design, by the invisible hand of powerful nations, but they are instead diversifying away from dependency on the United States and China. Think about recent agreements like EU, Mercosur, EU, India, CPP expansion, African Union frameworks deepening. None of this was top down designed.

00:23:38:22 - 00:24:19:21

Speaker 2

It was bottom up at the strategic level. Secondly, another framework I'd like to introduce to you that I witnessed as ambassador to India. And I'll just take the US India example. Organizations and structures like the quad which is the US, India, Japan and Australia. The work that we do together, talking about everything from disaster relief to climate to space, together with things like the iMac India Middle East European Corridor, which seeks not to put just the old Silk Route back, but the Spice Route back and link South Asia, Arabia and Europe together, in essence bringing that Kantian promise of economic dependency back.

00:24:19:22 - 00:24:44:19

Speaker 2

These are what I would call neither multilateral nor unilateral, but inter lateral structures, purpose built coalitions of the specifically interested, constructing frameworks for specific challenges. Think about aukus in terms of security with the United States. Australia. I didn't know the Australian Consul general would be here, but there's a lot of Australia content or even BRICs, which is falling short but has that same aspiration.

00:24:44:20 - 00:25:15:18

Speaker 2

Not bilateral deals, not universal institutions, but something in between, overlapping, almost like Lego pieces that can come together and be taken apart legitimately. Plural. And an example that brings us to the third point kind of blends both of these together. Subnational climate action, which is my work as mayor and now my job today, cities making binding commitments to each other that their own national governments wouldn't make has surpassed an ambition and measurable results.

00:25:15:19 - 00:25:43:12

Speaker 2

The climate action of all but a handful of nations in Glasgow at sea. At Cop26, I represented the cities of the world initially 100, the biggest cities that were about a quarter of the world's GDP. But we expanded to 1000, the equivalent of a country bigger than every country but four. And we are the only folks invited to the stage alongside the presidents and prime ministers, to make the pledge and hold ourselves accountable to being carbon neutral.

00:25:43:15 - 00:26:07:00

Speaker 2

So far, one country on this planet is on the path to meet the requirements of the Paris Climate Accord. One Denmark. But of the 100 largest cities of the world, 75% of them, including Los Angeles, are on track or ahead of track. And don't tell me cities aren't tough to run. Our economy here is as big as the ninth largest economy in the world.

00:26:07:00 - 00:26:35:03

Speaker 2

It is the third largest city economy at more than $2 trillion in the Southern California region. So this network of governments voluntarily building the architecture of obligation from below is an important ingredient, not only challenging the bellicose environment we have today, but meeting the great challenges that our people are experiencing with climate change. The local dimension of the conditions of peace goes deeper than just climate policy.

00:26:35:08 - 00:26:58:22

Speaker 2

Eleanor Roosevelt, many of you, I'm sure, are familiar with a quote when she talked about when she was asked, where do human rights actually begin? Her answer was in small places close to home, so small and so close that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. The places where we study, the places where we live, the places where we work and pray that human rights mean nothing globally if they don't mean something there.

00:26:58:22 - 00:27:30:11

Speaker 2

And the same is true with the conditions of peace. The forces pulling the international order apart didn't originate in Foreign Ministry's. This is maybe the most important point I want to make today. They originated in communities that lost manufacturing jobs to the China shock that were told that this was progress in towns where the opioid crisis arrived. The same year, the factory closed in the ballot box where people left behind found their vocabulary in nativist politics and grievance.

00:27:30:13 - 00:27:59:05

Speaker 2

Let me say that when the grand strategy tends to obscure that, most things actually start in local communities, this post-World War II building distributed its benefits disproportionately to the powerful. The global South was in the basement. Rural communities in the American West were given efficiency and handed closures in an Indian state like jargon, they were promised all sorts of things but only got resource extraction.

00:27:59:11 - 00:28:27:09

Speaker 2

The Age of Rage is the accumulated invoice of that exclusion, and any new architecture that repeats that mistake will face the same revolt. So our new architecture must invest significantly more at the subnational level. Of course, you're going to get that prejudice from a former mayor. But it's true in community resilience, in alleviating material suffering, in addressing the domestic conditions of political frame that make people more willing to elect bellicose leaders.

00:28:27:10 - 00:28:50:11

Speaker 2

Local leaders are not merely implementers of agreements handed down from above. They are the first line of offense and of defense. Take allies the Alliance for Local Leaders International, recently launched by Ambassador Nina Hagen, who served as your deputy mayor, and my administration for international relations. We started this by talking to mayors in eastern Central Europe who were resisting people like Viktor Orban.

00:28:50:11 - 00:29:16:03

Speaker 2

And as we saw troops and Ice agents come to towns like Minneapolis, we wanted to know what is the playbook to resist. And now we're writing that playbook, connecting local leaders globally, across borders to share playbooks for defending democracy itself, how to respond when disinformation targets your community, how to engage with Beijing when it reaches out to your city, how to communicate with a foreign policy crisis suddenly lands in your city.

00:29:16:05 - 00:29:41:00

Speaker 2

The conditions of peace are made or unmade, in rural jargon, in rural West Virginia, right here in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles. And that is where our work must begin. The term I'll give this third framework is civic substrate, the underlying layer of communities, cities and local institutions that ties people and places together below the level of nation states in construction.

00:29:41:00 - 00:30:03:12

Speaker 2

Of course, substrate is what you prepare before you pour the foundation, not the visible structure, but what makes the structure possible. What determines whether what is built above it will hold and not? And unlike the structures above it, it is largely invisible, which is why it's so often understandably neglected. Why its failure goes unnoticed until the building above it begins to crack.

00:30:03:14 - 00:30:36:22

Speaker 2

The threat to the civic substrate is not the fire from above the arsonist, the autocrats. It is neglect and rot from below, economic despair, civic disengagement, epistemic collapse that disinformation produces in communities with no shared reality. It's a darn social media feed. It is the preparation of the ground on which everything else must be ordered. The post-World War II order failed to reach the basement, but the civic substrate is our commitment not to repeat that failure and to build this time from the bottom up.

00:30:37:02 - 00:31:05:00

Speaker 2

So where is the United States in all of this? I felt viscerally in two years as your ambassador, what American power feels like, what it means when exercised with generosity and confidence. We were the key architects of this post-World War II order. We designed its foundation. We funded its construction. We enforced its rules imperfectly, even sometimes hypocritically, but with enough consistency to make this building stand for 80 years.

00:31:05:01 - 00:31:25:00

Speaker 2

And even as we, the architects, are burning the building down, the world can't afford to have the United States absent from future design. No one country can now be the master architect. China has the ambition, but not yet the relationships. Europe has the values, but not the strategic weight. India has the scale and democratic legitimacy, but not yet.

00:31:25:00 - 00:31:52:16

Speaker 2

The global capacity and its strategic autonomy doctrine deliberately precludes that role. For now, middle powers are building what Prime Minister Mark Carney has described as a third path with energy and seriousness. But they need a major power at the table, the major power at the table. If what they build is to have the weight to hold, the world needs the United States not as a unilateral enforcer, but as a humble and indispensable architect.

00:31:52:16 - 00:32:15:01

Speaker 2

And not the United States is a single leader, but all of us the institutions, the immigrants, the subnational entities that we have that collectively can model once again what it means when the world is reflected on the streets of our cities and our states, and what that means to the world when we radiate it out. Let me name those obligations directly.

00:32:15:01 - 00:32:40:22

Speaker 2

As I close, I think we can't talk about Brody without. First and foremost, as we look at the threats to peace hold the nuclear floor, we forget that was part of the excuse of this war in Iran, but absolutely non-negotiable. Regardless of who is in power in Washington, Beijing and Moscow and to many other places, the Doomsday Clock stands at 85 seconds to midnight, the most perilous setting in its 79 year history.

00:32:40:22 - 00:33:14:11

Speaker 2

And Brody's foundational contribution was that the purpose of military power is no longer to win wars, but to avert them. That that must not become a negotiating chip between buildings. Second, governance our shared challenges now from wherever we stand climate, AI, pandemics and migration. They're not going to wait for a political moment to improve the Strait of Hormuz crisis that we are experiencing today, as I speak, is also an argument for accelerating an energy transition, not as idealism, but as a strategic necessity.

00:33:14:13 - 00:33:38:16

Speaker 2

Every percentage point of the global economy that moves off fossil fuels, still 80% of what fuels our world economy reduces the leverage of these choke points through which these fuels travel. That's not environmentalism, that's Brody. Third, rebuild shared stakes across all of the buildings, including the voices that were excluded the last time. The global South is not wrong to feel that the rules were written without them.

00:33:38:16 - 00:33:58:06

Speaker 2

Listen to Africa. Don't treat it as just a place where there's supposed to be assistance or development, but see it as the powerhouse that it is becoming. Look in the Global South for the intellectual capital and ideas that are flowing from there, and treat them as equals, not as Lester's and forth. And this brings us back to where I started.

00:33:58:08 - 00:34:29:14

Speaker 2

Tend the bridges relentlessly. We might not be chimpanzees, but we have diplomats, alliances, those fora and people to people connections that make all the difference. I learned that as mayor. I learned that as ambassador, that usually those big moments of history come to down to a relationship that two or a handful of people have with each other, that they didn't just show up at the moment of crisis, but that they know each other and trust each other and can navigate the toughest moments.

00:34:29:16 - 00:34:51:15

Speaker 2

It is in the precise sense that the primatologist meant our civic duty. This is the lesson. International relations isn't just conducted in South Bloc. For those of you who know India or in the Oval Office, it's conducted in places that I've witnessed, like a cricket pitch in South India, where blind bowlers and batters remind me that a human connection doesn't even require sight.

00:34:51:18 - 00:35:20:11

Speaker 2

It was at a girls school that I saw in Rajasthan, where students who had never met an American, let alone in American ambassador, had their ambitions permanently altered by a single conversation in the farmers whose mangoes crossed an ocean before they shared their sweetness with friends on another continent. It is a kitchen. That kitchen in Bengaluru were a tiny blue flame were ordinary, tiny civilizational flame tells a family that the world is, for this moment, still working.

00:35:20:16 - 00:35:43:06

Speaker 2

And it is in a forest in Uganda, where scientists are learning that the capacity for lethal conflict and the capacity for peace sustaining bonds are not opposites. Like it or not, they are the same inheritance pulling in different directions. The direction we move depends on this room and rooms like this, which bonds we tend, which bridges we let fall.

00:35:43:08 - 00:36:10:16

Speaker 2

The building is on fire. My friends, some of what is burning needed to come down. The rot, the injustice, the deferred maintenance of decades. Let it go. But the conditions of peace, the habits of restraint, the channels of communication, the shared stakes, the absolute refusal to let catastrophic conflict become thinkable again. These must survive the fire. These must be the load bearing walls we take to the new structures.

00:36:10:16 - 00:36:35:19

Speaker 2

And we will construct more than one, and we will construct and adapt and construct again, as every generation before ours has had to. Bernard Brody spent his life arguing that the purpose of military power was not to win a war, but to avert them, and that the highest function of strategy was not victory, but the construction of conditions which made catastrophic defeat for anyone become impossible.

00:36:35:21 - 00:36:57:01

Speaker 2

Today we are his inheritors, and this age of rage will pass. Rage always does. I used to say a prayer when I was mayor. Every night before I went to sleep, I used to ask God to bring peace to this world. And as I closed my eyes, I then asked him to bring peace to this country and peace to our state, the Golden State of California.

00:36:57:01 - 00:37:17:03

Speaker 2

And then I would bring it back to our city, bring peace to the City of Angels, and I'd think about my neighborhood and ask him to bring peace to that neighborhood and the people who were my neighbors, and then to my household and my family. And I'd always end with, and please bring peace to me. If we don't start from the smallest unit, we can't hope for there to be world peace.

00:37:17:03 - 00:37:29:14

Speaker 2

But the time has come for all of us to understand that the conditions of peace aren't over there. They're right here tonight. Thank you.

00:37:29:16 - 00:37:36:16

Speaker 3

Let me just start. You focused on the war that they've done. You talked a lot about your experiences in India here, those two actions.

00:37:36:16 - 00:37:53:21

Speaker 1

And so let me just ask you about where you see India specifically in relation to this conflict. So you mentioned the energy connection. You mentioned there strategic autonomy, such an important place that you know so well. What do you see happening in the next months, weeks, years, whatever time frame you want to pick?

00:37:53:23 - 00:38:16:00

Speaker 2

It's a great question. I think I'll be in India next week. So I wish this was a question of two weeks because it would be more informed from conversations I'll have. But you know, India has really it was postwar India and independent India was really defined by three things, all of which are kind of gone. But one of them, which was the nonaligned sense, has been replaced by this thing called strategic autonomy.

00:38:16:05 - 00:38:36:19

Speaker 2

India always joke, loves being the prettiest guy or prettiest girl at the dance. You know, Russia dances with us, America dance with us. Besides Pakistan and China, you know, they can talk to anybody and they like that, and they don't want to be tied down. If alliances are the marriages of of international relations, they want a date and they're not interested in getting married.

00:38:37:00 - 00:38:49:19

Speaker 2

As a side note, if I can embarrass my former executive officer, who's a PhD student here, Poonam, she got married yesterday in the Bay area. Congratulations, Poonam. She was right there.

00:38:49:21 - 00:39:10:18

Speaker 2

That aside, but I think this is the last year has been really tough on India. When I saw Prime Minister Modi, when I left, he was really grateful. I think no American president has known India and been as pro India as President Biden was, but he was confident in his relationship with with Donald Trump. And I was very polite about it.

00:39:10:18 - 00:39:30:21

Speaker 2

But I kind of said in in nicer words, you're going to be surprised. You might try to screw you three ways you don't see coming. And I've counted five already, and this way that it kind of figured that they're very close personal relationship with disrupt stuff. I joke with my Indian friends. Indians, as we've been negotiating a trade deal, finally met their match because Donald Trump negotiates like an Indian.

00:39:31:00 - 00:39:49:00

Speaker 2

I think Indians will know that. Like where it's like, okay, now one more thing, now one more thing. And it's and they're like thrown off their game. Second, Pakistan played Trump so well that they're at the center of all of this. And I think that's extremely frustrating to the Indians diplomatically, who are very good diplomats and and very skilled.

00:39:49:02 - 00:40:14:23

Speaker 2

And third, India is so closely tied most of our military maps, which is where we see most of the world, like we have a line in our military commands between India and Pakistan. So everything to the west is Pakistan and the Middle East. At Central Command and Indo-Pacific command is everything to the east. That I used to joke, India is usually the where the legend is, it's the fringes.

00:40:14:23 - 00:40:36:11

Speaker 2

Instead of centering a map in which you put South Asia in the middle and you understand just how close historically and today, South Asia and the Arab and Middle Eastern areas, they call it West Asia because that's their perspective, of course, not the Middle East. It's west of them is, you know, those countries wouldn't function without Indian workers.

00:40:36:13 - 00:40:57:14

Speaker 2

India wouldn't function without the capital that comes back. But increasingly it's entrepreneurs from India who are working in places like UAE. And I know we have represented from the UAE consulate here, and there's this wonderful relationship, you know, Middle East wouldn't eat without India, and India wouldn't thrive without the Middle East. And I think that they are very, very worried about what's happening.

00:40:57:15 - 00:41:20:09

Speaker 2

And the last thing I'll say is, I think for everybody, just like us as Americans, those of us who are Americans here, Donald Trump's inconsistency is only consistent in that it's inconsistent always. And that's tough to when you are responsible for making sure the blue flame keeps flickering. And there's material things, not just strategic ones, to know how to plan.

00:41:20:09 - 00:41:25:04

Speaker 2

And I think India, like many others, are just trying to get through the moment.

00:41:25:06 - 00:41:42:10

Speaker 1

Great, great. So you mentioned Pakistan and the way Pakistan is so central. You also talked a lot and you went pretty deep about the way the international system has worked, the way it was set up it since 1945. I'm just going to stick to India for a little bit longer, and then we're going to talk more about local issues.

00:41:42:10 - 00:42:02:17

Speaker 1

But with India it's interesting. India was one of the original signatories of the UN charter even before it was independent. But it's also been one of the most unhappy states about the current border that you mentioned, the way that, for example, the Security Council ratifies this sort of power structure of 1945, India would like to be represented. They're not happy with a lot of other features.

00:42:02:17 - 00:42:15:23

Speaker 1

Part of their autonomy, I think, stems from the sense of they don't really want to fit into either camp as they see it. So where do you see them going in the metaphor that you use? What sort of construction project would they take on if they could?

00:42:16:02 - 00:42:38:05

Speaker 2

It's a great question because, you know, I think India is experiencing and India did. I was very blessed that my first year they were hosting G-20. So we had it was the hottest country in the world. We had the most visits for my Secretary of Treasury. Treasury in any country in the world was India four times like it was like every week I was getting secretary of state, head of the CIA, national Security advisor.

00:42:38:06 - 00:42:58:22

Speaker 2

The president then came for G20, and India did a marvelous job of also inviting in the African Union to the table and doing a pre meeting with groups that weren't with countries that weren't big enough to be in the G20, to really do that Indian thing of saying, hey, we are the translators. India really sees itself as the crossroads of north, south of east, west of kind of big and small like it.

00:42:58:23 - 00:43:25:18

Speaker 2

And it does quite a good job with that. But I think India is now going out from being kind of domestically and regionally focused, increasingly looking in the world. For instance, when we had the Houthi kind of attacks on ships in the Red sea, we put together a coalition. They didn't want to formally be part of the coalition, but the first time they put a dozen ships in the western Indian Ocean and when there was hijackings of Somali pirates, they actually boarded those ships and freed people in the way that the US has done in the past.

00:43:25:18 - 00:43:47:10

Speaker 2

And didn't just do that because there was Indian sailors, they did it as part of the global commons and the freedom of navigation. If you want to be an architect, the problem is, once you're an architect, you got to actually maintain the building. And I think that's what India's, you know, wondering about, like how much do we want to put into the system because then that requires us to actually maintain it as well.

00:43:47:10 - 00:44:14:17

Speaker 2

And they prefer have historically preferred to like focus on their own nation building and a little bit in the region. I do see an India, though prouder and more confident to emerge into that space, to be more involved international organizations and even locating international organizations in India, the International Solar Alliance are going to mess up the acronym, the coalition for resilient of that development.

00:44:14:17 - 00:44:38:02

Speaker 2

But basically, Climate Disaster International Organization is their CRTC. And so they, I think, are envisioning themselves now as a place the world comes to, even bidding for the Olympics, you know, for 2036, I think. So those are all newly cosmopolitan, international, whether they want to be architects or not. I think they should be. I would absolutely welcome their indispensable.

00:44:38:04 - 00:44:58:11

Speaker 2

And one magic thing. I'll say the US and India together talk about the bilateral relationship. I always said it wasn't an additive relationship of the US plus India, it was multiplicative. And when the US and India did things, for instance, we started this Tribe Trilateral Development initiative, where the India where India and the US, India didn't want aid, development aid from the US.

00:44:58:15 - 00:45:18:10

Speaker 2

It's still a poor country per capita, but proud. And they said we can do things on our own. But they said we have experts and you have money and you have experts. Let's go to third countries like Fiji, Tanzania and start being two great powers together working on stuff. And that's some of that, you know, new level that I was talking about in my speech to the inter lateral.

00:45:18:14 - 00:45:28:17

Speaker 1

Right. Great. So when you were mayor, you referenced this obliquely. You mentioned again, we both know who was your first mayor, deputy mayor.

00:45:28:18 - 00:45:30:09

Speaker 2

First in American history in any city.

00:45:30:11 - 00:45:46:07

Speaker 1

For international affairs. So that was a path breaking thing. There is now that that tradition has continued in Los Angeles. There's still a position like that. What motivated you to do that? And you talked a bit. I think you referenced in your in your speech some of the things that probably brought that to being, but tell me how you thought about that.

00:45:46:07 - 00:45:50:12

Speaker 1

And what made you think that cities needed to engage in a serious way?

00:45:50:14 - 00:46:08:13

Speaker 2

The personal explanation is how I was raised. My parents grew up on opposite sides of the city. My mom was on the west Side, central and then West side. My dad from South LA, a Jew Mexican who met at Pan Am Airlines, and my dad had never left the country. They got engaged three weeks after the first date, got married three weeks later and headed off to London.

00:46:08:13 - 00:46:31:14

Speaker 2

And if they ever had extra money, my mom stayed at Pan Am. They would spend it on us seeing the world. Not vacations, but trips to places like India when I was 14 or China just after it opened up. And that planted a seed in me that I think all of us as Angelenos know that we can see the face of the world on the streets of L.A. but the opposite was true, that I felt like I saw the face of LA on the streets of the world.

00:46:31:14 - 00:46:56:17

Speaker 2

I could be at home in Mexico City or Cairo or Tokyo because I grew up here. So that was, I think, the personal answer, the political answer or policy answer is, I knew that we're the we have the largest port in the Western Hemisphere. At one point, when I was mayor of the third busiest airport and the number one busiest airport of origination and destination, where flights start and stop in the world, look at our population.

00:46:56:17 - 00:47:14:05

Speaker 2

63% of us immigrants are children of immigrants, not counting migrants from inside the US who go from one state to another. So like you cannot succeed as a city if you don't. But then we also were woefully behind. Sure, we exported movies, but only 1% of our businesses do any international business in this town. So we sought to double that.

00:47:14:06 - 00:47:34:05

Speaker 2

And as I looked at the things we were doing, climate work, we could be very successful in LA. But if the whole world wasn't doing it, we'd all suffer. We needed to build an office in a position that wasn't just about protocol. We have more consul generals consulates here than all but two cities in the world, and very proud that India has opened up its new consulate here.

00:47:34:09 - 00:47:55:08

Speaker 2

San Francisco, great city. But it's not LA, and we're waiting for Vietnam to fully make that. But every other country basically in the world has, you know, big, bigger country has a consulate here. And so in the past it was just protocol like who's visiting and do that? But if we were going to win the Olympics, if we were going to expand international trade, create jobs, etc., we need to do that.

00:47:55:09 - 00:48:15:01

Speaker 2

Third is in an emergency. It's really good. It strengthens your city. When I was chair of C40, which again is the 100 largest cities in the world, it's the only mayor organization about anything. It happens to be around climate. But when the pandemic hit, second zoom I ever did, I still didn't know what a zoom really was. I called all those.

00:48:15:02 - 00:48:40:21

Speaker 2

It's actually 97 mayors. And if you can imagine all the different time zones, somebody was in the middle of the morning and the night we got, I think, 50 of them, which was remarkable. I think the first time 50 mayors of Tokyo and Melbourne and London and Mexico City, we all got on a call together. And the mayor, now late mayor of Seoul, told us about how you could do testing in a car drive through testing long before anybody knew what that was.

00:48:40:22 - 00:48:58:13

Speaker 2

The mayor of Milan. Because remember in that first week that was the hot spot in the world, said, this is what you need to do with your hospital so that fewer people die. Literally what you need to do with the beds. And immediately mayors who I always joke good mayors borrow great mayor steal were thieves stealing these ideas and implementing them.

00:48:58:13 - 00:49:17:20

Speaker 2

And my successor at C40 who still are chair the mayor of London City, Kahn told the story of going to Boris Johnson and sharing this zoom call. And Boris Johnson was getting upset and talking to his cabinet. Why aren't we doing these things, getting masks cheaper, figuring out ways to get our hospitals there? Like, sir, we're putting the report together.

00:49:17:20 - 00:49:39:00

Speaker 2

It'll be ready this week or next, and then you can start talking to other prime ministers and presidents. And Sadiq said the difference between mayors and cities in that local level and us being networked internationally was hours and days versus weeks and months. And here in those early days, Los Angeles had a death rate that was half of New York's.

00:49:39:04 - 00:49:54:02

Speaker 2

Newark was a little further ahead with the infection, but they also waited longer to shut down. And it was part of the reason I shut the city down first. And we don't want to talk about the pandemic. It never happened. I know we all got through it, but those international connections are there when you need them in emergencies.

00:49:54:04 - 00:50:10:21

Speaker 1

One of the things I like to point out to students is that L.A. County, at 10 million population roughly, would be a medium sized country in the world. So if you look at the kind of median country that about 200 countries median size is about 9 or 10 million. So we're a pretty big place on its own terms.

00:50:10:21 - 00:50:33:11

Speaker 1

You're talking about the linkages and how these linkages can kind of amplify that which is really important. Where do you see that going? So you establish this kind of system or I don't know who set up C40, but you are integral to it. It's continued on. We know that at the state level, there's also state to state interactions, meaning state of California, these kind of interactions, if you want to look ahead five years, ten years.

00:50:33:12 - 00:50:37:04

Speaker 1

Do you think that's going to continue. Do you think it's going to grow? Where do you see it happening?

00:50:37:05 - 00:50:59:10

Speaker 2

Absolutely. I mean, I came back from Montreal or Montreal, as I say there in French, and it was their climate week last week. And they asked me and Gina McCarthy, who used to be our EPA head and now head of America's All In, which is after being the climate nation's first national climate advisor under President Biden. We were like, we still like you as Canadians, and we're still doing climate stuff.

00:50:59:10 - 00:51:20:09

Speaker 2

We wanted to just let them know, because if you read the headlines, you think that everything's turning to hell in the world, when in reality these moments are actually seeing the work expand and grow, not the opposite. I was asked by UCLA students, some of whom may be here today for International Relations Journal here. Well, can't the federal government like, stop our climate progress?

00:51:20:11 - 00:51:44:06

Speaker 2

It's just a one time fake news. That's just fake news. Yes, there are important things like whether the EPA can regulate greenhouse gases. I don't want to downplay, but 80 to 90% of the action has always been always will be subnational. It's your taxes. It's your bills paying the Department of Water and Power that government can't tell us what energy mix, and don't really want to tell us what energy mix we're going to have.

00:51:44:07 - 00:52:05:03

Speaker 2

And so we'll go from 3%. When I started as a council member in 2001 to 97% zero carbon electricity in those three decades. You can see when I was down in Brazil representing the cities of the world, the second largest contingent, by the way, of local and state officials, after Brazil itself, was the United States. And all these people are like, what?

00:52:05:03 - 00:52:30:05

Speaker 2

The US is still doing this stuff. I said, not only are we like blueish people doing it in Texas. Did you guys know that then Texas, Florida and Ohio were responsible for 70% of the renewable power in this country last year, and that the largest oil basin in America, the Permian Basin in Texas, that the really red leaders of Texas are decarbonizing it at a rate now more quickly than than California.

00:52:30:06 - 00:52:50:09

Speaker 2

I mean, we've already done it, but at a rate now that's the fastest in the country. So, you know, you can hear the propaganda. But I think these that was just climate these networks will continue to expand. Technology makes it easy. I think we're finding that sweet spot of working at the national level. And we hope we get national governments that work with us.

00:52:50:09 - 00:52:53:13

Speaker 2

And when they do, you can go even further, but nothing's holding us back.

00:52:53:17 - 00:53:31:10

Speaker 1

Last question for me and then we'll open it up. So just riffing on that climate, your long standing interest in that, you mentioned in your remarks about the war and the impact it had on India, but also here we see gas prices are high all over the world, LNG, all of these issues. Do you see this conflict as somehow turning into a turning point for thinking about the strategic elements of climate change, not only climate change as an environmental issue, which is sort of dropped off of our media attention, but the fact that fossil fuels are so vulnerable in all the ways that you described, how do you see that evolving?

00:53:31:12 - 00:53:53:03

Speaker 2

Well, I wish I could give an easy answer, but the complicated answer is I think a lot of people are seeing the way the world economy is constructed now. You're overly dependent on Petro states, where you're going to be overly dependent on renewable manufacturing, states that we will displace the leverage that certain countries have now with a potential leverage of mostly China.

00:53:53:03 - 00:54:05:00

Speaker 2

And China has done an amazing job being able to produce cheap electricity for the world and renewable power inputs. But we need to figure out a way to diversify from both.

00:54:05:03 - 00:54:17:07

Speaker 1

So let me just push on that for a second. Once you buy the solar panels, which are incredibly cheap from China, just to go with solar for a second, then you have them. And the energy's all essentially manufactured at home. Isn't that fundamentally different?

00:54:17:10 - 00:54:35:21

Speaker 2

Yes, it absolutely could be. But when you have a 20% jump in, the power that's needed because of data centers and the growth of AI, which people don't like, but also when the pole, they like that America is leading, but they don't like it at all, and then they like using it. It's like.

00:54:35:23 - 00:54:36:23

Speaker 1

Our students love it.

00:54:37:00 - 00:55:08:02

Speaker 2

Yeah. I'm sure. Exactly. And we can find you and we know when you're using it. I went, yeah, but you know, that sense of like, I was reading a great piece actually by an Australian who was talking about that supply chain, like where, you know, the competition between AI War, if we can't find peace and power, is going to be this three way fight where countries are putting strategic plans of how to take those solar panels and melt down the silver from them.

00:55:08:02 - 00:55:32:01

Speaker 2

Because there's such a chokehold in China, silver is rarely mind on its own. It's the byproduct of a couple other things. When there's in smelters that are controlled disproportionately, sometimes 80, 90% by China. You know, China is not an expansive, bellicose nation, which is a good thing, you know, right now outside of its own neighborhood. Okay. It's not yet seeking.

00:55:32:02 - 00:55:33:01

Speaker 1

Some would dispute that.

00:55:33:02 - 00:55:57:13

Speaker 2

But yeah, I mean, okay, but in a different way than, let's say, some of the historical expansionist that led to World War One, World War Two. That said, they have been unafraid to use their power to choke us, and we have been unafraid to use our power to choke back. I guess that's a good thing, because then again, it's a new type of mutually assured destruction.

00:55:57:13 - 00:56:25:10

Speaker 2

But if any of those powers becomes disproportionately powerful in one thing, they have a monopolistic way of being able to stop that. So the students were asking what's what's better, the choke point of the Strait of Hormuz or the choke point of you can't get any more solar and you're still 80% hydrocarbon economy today. And what what are the conditions for getting those solar panels?

00:56:25:11 - 00:56:30:19

Speaker 2

If it's just a free market, great. Doesn't matter where they're made. That hasn't been the last few years of.

00:56:30:21 - 00:56:44:14

Speaker 1

Great okay. So I'm going to take questions. Just raise your hand, wait for a microphone I'll start right here in the front. Maybe just quickly identify yourself. Thank you okay.

00:56:44:14 - 00:57:09:23

Speaker 4

Thank you. I'm Nicholas Alexi teaching with the United Nations. Firstly, thank you for your service. Thank you, Lieutenant Garcetti. Thank you for bringing amazing folks, inspiring hope really quickly. I really like what you built. I felt almost like I was in the Talking Heads concert. We went from burning down the house to once in a lifetime. Check out the lyrics.

00:57:10:00 - 00:57:10:21

Speaker 2

How did I get here?

00:57:10:22 - 00:57:14:22

Speaker 4

How did I get here? My God, what have we done?

00:57:15:00 - 00:57:25:09

Speaker 2

So we're a bigger suit. Next. There's a whole generation saying what you guys have been talking about. It was a really cool documentary out.

00:57:25:09 - 00:57:56:00

Speaker 4

About it. Some of the folks here. No, AI can't replace it anyway. Okay, so what I'm seeing and understanding architecture, building local, expanding. International. I just received today from the city of LA for me to ask if I'm okay with $174 bill to maintain the streetlights, or whether I'm opposed to that. I showed it to my wife and she said, it's only 174 bucks.

00:57:56:01 - 00:58:05:04

Speaker 4

I showed it to my two sons and they said, you could take us out to dinner with 174 bucks. How do we at the same time? And I.

00:58:05:04 - 00:58:08:09

Speaker 2

Tried it took for them at home and pay for the light.

00:58:08:11 - 00:58:38:23

Speaker 4

At the same time. I try to teach my students, as you're doing hope and long term sustainability, long term gain games. We have insolvency local level. We have a dystopian neighborhoods. We have 40% of voters who are undecided for their local leadership. At the same time, we hear insolvency, the international level, the United Nations, the lack of the Security Council, maintaining and intervening, quote, unquote.

00:58:39:00 - 00:58:56:21

Speaker 4

I know this is very hyper and idealistic building hope is such a critical element of the pieces of the table and chair that you described to be built. How do we realistically maintain hope for people?

00:58:56:23 - 00:59:10:08

Speaker 2

Well, you know, it's interesting that probably has some opinions about this too. By the way, anything that's wrong now is probably my fault. And then I blame Zev because he started it. So, you know, you always blame who came before. But but I think Zev and I were pretty good with the money. I left the biggest surplus we've ever had.

00:59:10:09 - 00:59:39:03

Speaker 2

And Zev was was known as Doctor No. When it came to budgets, both in the county and city, it's really tough for progressive people. But if you say no in the short term, you can say yes in the long term. That said, you know, hope, you know, there's this great Marge Piercy poem, Stone Paper Knife that talks about hope, paraphrase hope, waiting along frost line like a slumbering bear waiting to arise.

00:59:39:06 - 00:59:59:10

Speaker 2

And there's this kind of sense that hope is not something that a Savior will deliver when around election time, especially Democrats. You know the old cliche that Democrats want to fall in love and Republicans fall in line, although now Republicans seem to fall like to fall in love, and maybe Democrats will fall in line. I don't know.

00:59:59:12 - 01:00:00:12

Speaker 1

I'm not holding my breath.

01:00:00:13 - 01:00:24:18

Speaker 2

Yeah, but but we do have this. We're getting lazier and lazier as citizens in the world and especially here. Part of that is because you can click and get anything you want from anywhere in the world. You know that 178 bucks, you can get meals and you don't have to leave your house. I read that we have a 14 year old daughter, and I read that there that children today in America spend less time outside than inmates do.

01:00:24:18 - 01:00:53:22

Speaker 2

On average, when the riots happened in 1992, there was all the conversations like, oh, blacks and Koreans just need to sit down and talk and get to know each other. And that happened. But there were such superficial conversations. It wasn't until we found common work to actually build together. I found as a council member, wasn't until I got that Bangladeshi American and that Congolese immigrant and that Salvadorian that are living, all complaining about not having a park or the tagging on their street to work on it together and not just assume that it would get done for them.

01:00:54:00 - 01:01:13:06

Speaker 2

That hope really starts to emerge because the hope comes from realizing your own power. Hope comes from realizing your own agency. That's why the pandemic was so tough. Every night, as I talked to all of you, I would always give you something to do. I don't know if you noticed that, but somebody told me, communicate relentlessly, but make them actors in this play, not just observers.

01:01:13:06 - 01:01:33:09

Speaker 2

And we think democracy is about showing up at election time. And Ernst Renan, the French, said the nation is a daily plebiscite and it relies on two things share a shared story. We have to rewrite our story and make sure we share it because we don't. It crumbles and then daily consent and part of daily consent. It comes from daily action.

01:01:33:09 - 01:01:47:06

Speaker 2

And so to me, whether it's national service, whether it's, you know, ways of finding common projects, we won't be able to build up the feeling of that hope unless we're actually working.

01:01:47:08 - 01:01:52:19

Speaker 1

Okay. Other questions right here.

01:01:52:21 - 01:01:56:23

Speaker 5

Thank you, Honorable ambassador. My name is Sam Murray and I'm from India.

01:01:57:00 - 01:01:58:18

Speaker 2

So from Bombay. You told me.

01:01:58:19 - 01:02:21:19

Speaker 5

Yes, yes. So my question is this. Whereas on one side, politically, India is aligned with Israel. And on the other side its economist oxygen is Iran. So how will that eventually play out. What do you think? And secondly, have you had any dialog with any officials in India about the carbon footprint?

01:02:21:21 - 01:02:50:03

Speaker 2

Yes. The second a lot of conversations about carbon footprint in India is actually electrifying and adding renewables at a pace faster than China at the same point. Part of the problem, and it's a good problem, is that Indians are coming into the middle class as rapidly as Chinese did out of poverty, that in a hot country people are buying things like air conditioners and cars, and so they're adding as much coal as they are adding renewables at the same time.

01:02:50:03 - 01:03:22:08

Speaker 2

But the country is now 50% capacity renewable energy, even if only about 20% of the actual electricity distributed is from renewable sources. So we've talked a lot about that. We have all sorts of technology initiatives between our two countries that I hope aren't being killed by this administration, about discovering the next ways of manufacturing green technologies, transportation, etc. the promise of cold, not of cold fusion of small modular reactors, which was part of the deal that the US and India made, I think has to be probably a part of that.

01:03:22:08 - 01:03:36:04

Speaker 2

But yeah, a ton of that. I would dispute just a little bit. I think Iran, they have decent relations with and have worked on some things, but they're not super close with Iran. They're they're friendly, but I don't think there's a lot of political oxygen.

01:03:36:10 - 01:03:39:09

Speaker 1

The question suggested in an economic tie, I think there.

01:03:39:09 - 01:03:59:08

Speaker 2

Are well, the economic and the economic piece, they're tied somewhat, but they're much more tied with with the Arab countries in the Gulf than with Iran. So they have a lot at stake when those countries aren't happy, when their diaspora can't work, when people who are high net worth suddenly are like, maybe I shouldn't be starting my company in Dubai.

01:03:59:09 - 01:04:22:00

Speaker 2

Those two regions are really linked, and it's a complicated linking because you're right. Israel and India have come together. Israel. I remember the consul general of Israel telling me that after the United States and maybe Germany, that they thought India was its closest ally in the world. There's a lot of technology, things that they've done together, a lot of water and agriculture and things.

01:04:22:00 - 01:04:46:16

Speaker 2

So there's that connection. But they also have very good connections with Arab countries. At a time when Prime Minister Modi has been criticized for anti-Muslim rhetoric, that it's complicated, but somehow they make it work through, really, you know, supple diplomacy, I would say. But the longer this goes on, India, I think, will go back to that comfort zone of, okay, the whole world is a hostile place.

01:04:46:16 - 01:05:06:12

Speaker 2

You've got to look out for yourself, talk to others when you need to make transactions that you can, but don't get too close to anyone and let them come to you. And India increasingly can say that because with 1.4 billion people who are increasingly going to be wealthy, they will be in this century the world's largest economy. For sure, the math is indisputable.

01:05:06:13 - 01:05:12:14

Speaker 2

It will not. Well, the China will pass the US or not, I don't know, but India will pass both of us by the end of the century.

01:05:12:16 - 01:05:20:06

Speaker 6

So at some point you will see. And yet it's sort of from Israel because of economic conditions. No, no.

01:05:20:07 - 01:05:39:18

Speaker 2

I don't think that's the I guess what I was saying is they've been able to maintain that with Israel without any consequence from Arab and Muslim led countries. They're managing to do both. And I think it's because they're just all tied together too much that the cost of doing that, nobody asks that of each other, at least at this point.

01:05:39:20 - 01:05:44:18

Speaker 1

Right here. Thank you.

01:05:44:20 - 01:05:55:08

Speaker 7

Since you. Hi. How are you? Since you brought up Covid, I do want to just start out by saying thank you so much for what you did. I listened to your calls. At the end of the day.

01:05:55:11 - 01:05:57:00

Speaker 2

Sorry we had nothing else.

01:05:57:00 - 01:05:57:20

Speaker 8

To do.

01:05:57:22 - 01:06:23:07

Speaker 7

And I can still remember some of what you said. So really and truly, I'm sure that was a big challenge, but thank you. So I have a very sort of local question, which is cause you talked about thinking like architects and what comes next. And I'm on the board of an organization that co-founded one of the nine hydrogen hubs around the country called the West Coast, California.

01:06:23:08 - 01:06:43:10

Speaker 7

It's called arches. And so we were one of the co-founders of that. And so no surprise, I mean, actually, we were getting some of the, you know, we were supposed to get over $1 billion. We were getting some of it. But no surprise, recently, the president announced that the red the red state hubs are going to get funded.

01:06:43:10 - 01:07:15:05

Speaker 7

And the two West Coast hubs will, of course, arches mean one of them will not be funded. So in reference to what you said, my question is thinking and we just I just had a board meeting this morning. We were talking about, you know, trying to be creative, thinking forward like creatively what you know, when you think about something that's so important and innovative public private partnerships, other ways to fund something like that endeavor.

01:07:15:09 - 01:07:23:20

Speaker 7

Arches. What are some of the thoughts that come to your mind? Because, you know, I know you've had to deal with this in so many different ways. Thank you.

01:07:23:21 - 01:07:52:14

Speaker 2

Sure. Of course. Welcome to my lecture on hydrogen. So I'll try to be really brief because I spent a lot of time with hydrogen. I don't want to get too far afield, but it's actually interesting. India, I think, is one of the places that may crack she hydrogen. They've got refining experience, which you actually need to have people who are chemical, chemically experienced, and they've got cheap enough labor and they've got the need for diversifying fuels.

01:07:52:14 - 01:08:14:01

Speaker 2

It's still very expensive to make in the United States, and it's expensive to transport because it's the lightest element, and it's tough to transport and pipelines and let alone on ships. But but I think it's an important technology to continue pushing. Certainly as mayor, we looked at getting what was the largest coal plants that we had offline in Utah.

01:08:14:01 - 01:08:35:13

Speaker 2

We own and completely get rid of the coal plants to put turbines that we're going to run on natural gas, which was seen as pretty progressive at the time. But then we realized we could do a mix, probably of natural gas and hydrogen, and maybe one day, 100% hydrogen made green hydrogen from the excess solar power and wind power coming from the Midwest that comes up to that plant.

01:08:35:13 - 01:08:50:09

Speaker 2

But on days that can't use it, it just we lose that. But maybe it could actually be manufactured right there. And I don't think that you can give just to the red states and not give here, because none of this will work as an interconnected system if you don't have the largest port in America and the Western Hemisphere involved in that.

01:08:50:09 - 01:09:17:13

Speaker 2

So my ideas would really be talk to the port of Long Beach and Los Angeles. They're looking both at electric vehicles for the trucks, but also hydrogen. And I think those are the best places locally to find any resources in the meantime. And obviously there's the controversy about Scattergood, which is the power plant just to the south of LAX, and whether that those old gas turbines should be turned into hydrogen or some environmental just make them into batteries and things like that.

01:09:17:14 - 01:09:24:23

Speaker 2

We don't need the hydrogen. I think it's good to still test the hydrogen there, and that's a good place to do it.

01:09:25:00 - 01:09:27:21

Speaker 1

Okay. Question in the back.

01:09:27:23 - 01:09:45:08

Speaker 9

Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. I believe it was Fisher and Yuri in their work getting to. Yes. Who coined the acronym best alternative to a negotiated agreement as we approach the deadline. Do you think there is a bad enough for the US and for Iran? And if so, what is it?

01:09:45:10 - 01:10:05:08

Speaker 2

I almost got through the whole day without like, well, how would you make peace in. I mean, it's so it's it's so. Both sides are such unconventional negotiators. I had a good friend who comes from one of the countries that never negotiate with somebody who comes from a country, starting with I, Iran, Israel and India. They're the best negotiators in the world.

01:10:05:09 - 01:10:23:14

Speaker 2

Americans are terrible negotiators. We go to the store, it's like, okay, I want to buy this glass. It's $10. It says $10. Here's $10. You leave the store in India. It's like. Don't worry about the sticker. It could be ₹10. It could be ₹1. It could be ₹100. See it. Let's have some tea. Tell me about your family.

01:10:23:16 - 01:10:40:06

Speaker 2

If you don't get up and leave the store a couple of times, you're not serious about negotiating. Indians will negotiate with their best friends, with their family. They'll yell at each other. It was my chief of staff in India's birthday, and we were in Goa. And I said, there's only one store that was open with like, little trinkets.

01:10:40:06 - 01:10:55:06

Speaker 2

I said, get whatever you want. And she got an effort tower and a Statue of Liberty and some bangles. And it was 20 bucks and I was about to pay, and my security detail was like, no. And started in Hindi, like arguing with the guy. And it went on for 15 minutes back and forth and they're like, now you can pay.

01:10:55:07 - 01:11:14:03

Speaker 2

And I said, how much? And it was the Cleveland of $17. I was like, $3 was not worth those 15 minutes. So I don't know, you know, I think the the Iranians don't have much of an incentive to actually negotiate right now. I think they feel like they hold a lot of cards. And the American position is like, take this or leave it.

01:11:14:03 - 01:11:36:22

Speaker 2

And if you don't back that up with, we're going to bomb again. Not that I'm suggesting we should. What's the incentive of actually coming together? Iranians have found a new power. I don't see domestically that they feel insecure. I would really like to have the kind of briefings I did as ambassador to know on the ground. And I know some of you were talking about, you know, what's happening in Iran.

01:11:36:22 - 01:11:59:04

Speaker 2

I was talking to my friend Shireen. She's like, the Botox appointments are still happening. People are like living as if there's no war going on. And so if there's not a price to pay domestically, sure, some people have been killed in leadership, but there's hundreds of thousands of people, if not low millions that have prospered from the way Iran is economically set up, not just religiously and socially.

01:11:59:04 - 01:12:18:07

Speaker 2

And they're not going to give up power easily. So I don't think there's ever been an end game. This is the strategic absurdism that Brody talked about. What was the goal? Was it I there's 5 or 6 different explanations. Those replace the leaders. It was we'll stop them from having missiles. It was nuclear weapons. Those will get the will.

01:12:18:09 - 01:12:54:16

Speaker 2

We'll stop them from exporting terrorism like all those things are most of them noble, you know, in the abstract, but at what price? At what school getting bombed and civilians getting killed because there's you know, we're so the difference between us and previous generations is war is so antiseptic, even to some extent in countries where it's happening, unless you're directly killed or in the neighborhood where the bomb is, because it's so precise and and it's no longer just the size of your army, the size of your navy, like so they blew up the Navy.

01:12:54:18 - 01:13:19:01

Speaker 2

We can brag about that, but so what? They're still able to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz because it doesn't take much anymore, as the Ukrainians, as I pointed to, also discovered, I was with President Biden in the Oval Office when Prime Minister Modi visited. Being President Biden, it was supposed to be a five minute meeting. But 45 minutes later, we you know, it was just there were six of us in the Oval Office was one of the neatest experiences of my life.

01:13:19:01 - 01:13:40:07

Speaker 2

But President Biden, who was really was the greatest president who's I think been a student of international relations his whole life, said war is changing more in these ten years than it's changed in the last 100. With the exception of nuclear weaponry, there's been no change anywhere close to what is happening now. So how do you negotiate peace when you don't know how war will be waged?

01:13:40:09 - 01:13:59:14

Speaker 2

How do you know peace when you don't have a vision of what you want to see? Which is where I think Brody has a lesson for all of us. It's not always about having the political outcome. Once you're in a war. He has this great chapter in there about World War One where everybody thought it would be done like this, and each general on each side said, I'll just go a little bit stronger.

01:13:59:14 - 01:14:37:06

Speaker 2

And meanwhile, millions of young men died unnecessarily because there was really no strategic end to it. And we if we don't have that idea short of that, then what are we left with? And that's what Brody is about. Create the conditions of peace so that the cost of war is too much. And maybe that's the lesson here. No matter what side you are on in this war, what you think about it's righteousness or not, the cost of war is too much for the world right now, and we have to figure out different ways to create conditions of peace, not to ignore human rights when they're being abused, not to leave people isolated, not to never

01:14:37:06 - 01:14:57:14

Speaker 2

use force, but at least to figure out a way that those conditions from the local community up. You know, Indians told me a few times when I mildly spoke up about, you know, one of our country's positions criticizing something happening in India. They're like, we agree with you, but that isn't your place to say. And it was a real lesson for me.

01:14:57:16 - 01:15:18:02

Speaker 2

Like, only Indians can change India and, you know, Iranians will change Iran. There's never been as much offered for that possibility. If it doesn't happen right here, right now, maybe this isn't the moment and there's not enough bombing that can create it tomorrow. But what seems strategically absurd is that we don't have not only a plan for peace.

01:15:18:02 - 01:15:22:22

Speaker 2

I don't know that we had a plan for victory in the war.

01:15:23:00 - 01:15:25:19

Speaker 1

Please join me in thanking Ambassador Eric Garcetti.