In December, the YRIS Interviews and Events Team sat down for an interview with Fausto Belo Ximenes, a member of the 2024 Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program. A human rights advocate and public policy practitioner, Ximenes was the Country Director for Timor-Leste with Oxfam International. He has worked with various grassroots and international organizations in Timor-Leste to promote inclusive economic development, human rights, climate justice, and civic participation.

The YRIS Interviews and Events Team discussed with Ximenes his journey into community advocacy and his experience promoting transitional justice in one of the youngest independent nations in the world. Throughout our conversation, Ximenes shared with us his belief in a model of community justice that is deeply rooted in education, grassroots empowerment, and personal connection. In an age where the dynamics of international development are sizeably shifting, Ximenes’ insights are incredibly powerful for anyone interested in global advocacy.

You can find the full interview to listen to above or read selected quotes from our interview with Ximenes below. Note that all quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

Vittal Sivakumar: Could you introduce yourself and tell us about your journey to your rule at Oxfam International?

Fausto Belo Ximenes:  Of course. My name is Fausto Belo Ximenes, and I am from Timor-Leste. In case some of the listeners don’t know where it is, it is a small island country located between Australia and Indonesia. Its political history includes 450 years of Portuguese colonization until 1975, and in 1975, it declared its independence for about two weeks, and after that, it was invaded by Indonesia, which led to the 24 years of subsequent occupation by the Indonesian military. Timor-Leste restored its independence in 2002.

I grew up under Indonesian military occupation. Growing up under occupation,  I witnessed a lot of human rights violations, violence, discrimination, and exclusion. At some point in my youth, I had been a recipient of international humanitarian assistance and witnessed the work of international development workers. This exposure led me to think deeply about what I wanted to do when I grew up whenever Timor-Leste became peaceful and independent. 

I finished my early education in Timor-Leste under the Indonesian occupation, including after Timor-Leste became an independent country, during which I was still in high school. I moved to the United States to attend Stony Brook University on Long Island, where I studied International Relations and Comparative Politics. This later led me to do graduate studies in public policy at Oxford and in human rights practice at Roehampton University.

For the past 14 years, I have been doing exactly the kind of work I wanted to do while growing up under occupation. This includes having worked with US government international development programs on access to justice, legal aid, rule of law, and democratic governance. 

Recently, prior to coming to Yale, I was the Oxfam International Country Director in Timor. We worked on an array of topics and themes, including responding to the COVID-19 and flood crises, working with youth groups, and working with women’s and girls’ groups to further their inclusion in the policy-making process.

Abla Abdulkadir: How would you describe your philosophies regarding peace building and international development?

Fausto Belo Ximenes:

When you work in the international development and humanitarian aid sector, especially in countries where there are contexts of conflict or post-conflict, there are a number of things to think about. Consider, for example, that you work and lead an organization of about 40-50 staff. It is really important to understand what your own staff are going through. One main reason they are part of your team is for job security and to provide food to their families, but many of them also may be going through things that you haven’t seen. There can sometimes be a disconnect between leaders and their teams when they haven’t experienced violence or war in countries with contexts of conflict. This gap in experience can prevent people from being leaders who are sensible and conscious about what impacts team performance. Leadership is not just about indicators and results. As critical as they are, the people behind successes and performances are also incredibly important. When you are a leader of an organization, you want to deliver, make an impact, and understand the well-being of your own team that is contributing and creating these impacts. 

What does this idea mean with regard to community? International development organizations are shifting today, although maybe not at the ideal pace. There are more efforts now to make sure that local communities, local organizations, and grassroots groups are the leaders of change that they want to see in their communities. Traditionally, international development has been rooted in colonialism. The dynamics of international development have been framed as the Global North supporting so-called less developed and developing countries. So there has always been a sort of divergence in the perception of people living in countries supported by international development. As somebody who has led international organizations, we think deeply about how to challenge these perceptions.

Abla Abdulkadir: What are some of the biggest challenges and efforts in promoting climate action and gender equality within the cultural and political context of Timor-Leste?

Fausto Belo Ximenes:

New countries definitely have their own challenges. Timor-Leste is a small half-island country. Half-island because East Timor, or Timor-Leste,  is a sovereign country. West Timor is part of Indonesia. Timor-Leste has a population of 1.3 million people, about 70 – 75% percent of which are under the age of 35. 

If you’re familiar with the youth bulge, it basically just shows that a country’s population is predominantly young people. Timor Leste has one of the most youthful populations in Asia-Pacific region I believe, or only just behind Afghanistan and a few other countries, This youth bulge can turn into a dividend with strategic investments when there are jobs for youth, when they are being prepared properly to enter into the market, and to be able to contribute to society. So basically, the youth dividend is just another way of saying a blessing. But, there can also be the opposite scenario. If a country is not making adequate investments in its youth, and if there are very few job prospects, we cannot see this youth dividend. If the education system is poor, and the quality of education, the actual substance of what’s been taught in schools and universities has not been designed to actually reflect today’s societal needs, and give youth a competitive edge, you cannot see a youth dividend. A youth bulge can translate into your dividend and can be a blessing with the right investments, but it can also be a curse. So what happens when you don’t invest in young people? Young people are the other leaders that we have to put in all the effort to actually support and prepare to lead countries going forward. Especially in post-conflict settings, where most of my professional work has taken place, there is that big risk of us not investing in youth, especially in countries as young as Timor-Leste.

Another critical challenge that the country faces is climate change. It’s beginning to impact communities more and more heavily. You see a greater number of climate-related or climate-induced disasters in Timor-Leste, and that is one, and I think most of the small island countries in the Pacific or in the Caribbeans or in other regions of the world are facing similar sort of challenges as well. It’s very important for these countries and territories, including Timor-Leste, to have collective voices in the global discussions around climate change and the impact on their islands, communities, and livelihoods. Timor-Leste is part of an association that is called Small Island Developing States, and it has been an advocate for global leaders to take into account the level of fragility and vulnerability that countries like Timor-Leste and other small island countries and territories are facing. Small island developing countries, all of them combined, have contributed the least to climate change. 

As leaders, as global leaders, whether you’re an American President or a British Prime Minister or the Head of the EU, when we are talking about supporting communities that are affected by climate change, we need to know who are affected the most. Our solution has to be such that these individuals, these households, these groups, and these countries have their needs met, not only when a program is fully designed and delivered but also during the process of developing programs. I know that there are now a couple of finance mechanisms to support these communities. So you have funding mechanisms like the Global Environment Facility, the Green Climate Fund, which have spoken about loss and damage funds, mostly proposed and advocated for strongly by small island developing nations. I think it’s very, very important that we know and understand and put resources where they’re most needed. Because these communities, these countries, these islanders have had little to do with climate change, and that’s the reason why I said earlier that we can’t just talk about climate change. We have to talk about climate justice and what talking about climate justice means.

Q: What advice do you have for young leaders who are looking to make a difference in the area of International Development?

International development is called international development because it’s most likely operating outside your own country. Say you’re from the States and you’re working in a developing country, and with actors that are diverse and systems and processes based on a global sort of systems and procedures that your organization has developed that apply to multiple different countries. Advice that I could provide to you and to all the listeners who are young and interested in joining international development is it is an exciting area, and you get to really support communities that you want to support. You get to see the impacts. You get to engage. And not only with the government. You engage with the communities. You engage with local leaders that oftentimes are like centers of powers that impact the work that we deliver. You also get to meet a lot of international people, bringing in different experiences and lives that enrich you and your team. So for me, of course, you see a lot of poverty, you see a lot of challenges, and you see a lot of suffering that people go through. Some are actually happening as you are in those countries. Some are just recovering, or barely recovering from those. So you see a lot of difficult situations, and you can’t have beautiful situations without also understanding and embracing difficult situations. You have to think about how you can contribute to improving those situations. So I would say that as young Yale College students, go out there and explore. Go out there and experience and experiment. And if it’s not for you, there’s always some other things that you could do, not necessarily international development, but there are always other work that you could be doing. But I would say, you know, the great thing about being young is time, right? You’ve got time, plenty of time on your hands. So that means, you know, exploring and testing. And see if that’s for you. For me, I started doing that before I went to college, and then I went back and kept doing that, and I’m still sticking to it because it’s not just a job, as I said, it’s a conviction. It’s a personal and professional conviction that I would like to continue supporting communities and countries that are struggling in multiple ways through international development and humanitarian aid work.

Image courtesy of the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs

As part of a series of conversations with the 2024 Class of the Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program, Abla Abdulkadir, Sarah Jeddy, and Owen Haywood of the YRIS Interviews and Events team sat down to interview the founder and Group CEO of Affinity Africa, Dr. Tarek Mouganie. Affinity Africa is a digital bank that specializes in providing banking services to underbanked populations in Africa, as well as lending for small businesses and micro-enterprises that otherwise struggle to access credit.

Mouganie discussed his journey from childhood in Ghana to the founding of Affinity Africa, during which time he obtained a PhD in physics from Cambridge and worked for eight years as a director at a hedge fund. Mouganie has sought to apply his financial experience towards his goal of African socioeconomic development by focusing Affinity Africa’s efforts on providing banking services that are more readily accessible in Africa. During the interview, Mouganie also shared his love for science, triathlons, and Afrobeats, as well as his advice for students looking to the start of their careers: “not to take things too seriously.” Mouganie’s desire to apply his talents to make a positive impact on the area of socioeconomic development shines through as an example for any student looking to make a difference in their career.

You can listen to the full interview linked above, or read selected quotes from our discussion with Dr. Tarek Mouganie below. All quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

Abla Abdulkadir: Could you go into depth on what Affinity Africa is, your role at the company, and what led you to found it? I am also interested in how your scientific background and interest in exploration and design shaped your ideas for Affinity Africa.

Tarek Mouganie: I was sort of obsessed with this idea of investing in Africa and the knock-on socioeconomic implications. After spending all this time at this hedge fund, I decided to get up one day and I quit my job, thanks to my mom. She was the catalyst. She said I was intolerable working for this fund, “What have they done to you, quit your job and come back home.” I quit my job, moved back to Ghana, and started focusing on this idea of getting investments into the continent, and in particular, supporting small businesses. I became obsessed with that idea. After trying to figure out how to build a fund that would invest in African startups and African small businesses, I then had this sort of aha moment. I had all this guilt of, like, eight years working for a hedge fund. “What did I do? Why did I waste my time, my life? Why was I there for so long?” And then I kind of paused, and I thought to myself, “I understand banking because of these eight years.” All the pieces just clicked, you know? And I was like, that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna start a bank. And that was it. 

The first thing that I did, getting back to your question on informed design, is I tried to figure out why banking has failed Africa. Just to throw out the statistics, looking at Sub-Saharan Africa in particular, only 42% of adults have a bank account. It’s crazy. I mean, the start of your financial freedom, financial journey is to actually be included in financial services. Even worse than that, less than 10% of businesses have access to credit. How can you grow without a loan? You have an idea. You want to start a business. You might be able to survive on the revenue that you generate in the cash flow, but to unlock your full potential, you need access to credit.

I realized that banking was invented and developed in the Global North, right? So it assumes, like all of us here who have a bank account in a country from the Global North, it assumes you’re formalized. It assumes you have a formal ID, you have an address, and you can prove that you have the address, too. You probably are formally employed and getting a check or at university, and you have to show that. So as a result, those are the three kinds of documentation that you need to actually go into a bank here in the US and actually open an account. Well, guess what? The majority of Africans, 87% of Africans, don’t have that information. So we had to try and understand, using informed design, how we could reinvent banking for the masses. 

And it wasn’t easy. We had a lot of stages of iteration…We actually only launched in January this year with a product in the market that we’re happy with. In March, we put out a product that we’re super happy with, and since then, we’ve actually onboarded 40,000 customers – and almost 10,000 accounts in the last six weeks alone. So it’s going like gangbusters. 62% of our customers are women, which is awesome. And almost 90% of our customers were opening their first ever bank account, which is pretty cool.

…

Sarah Jeddy: What makes small businesses so important for economic development?

Tarek Mouganie: I often use the comparison between OECD countries and countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.  So small businesses and micro enterprises are the drivers of social and economic growth. It’s crazy, you know. In the US and UK, they are actually 99.9% of registered businesses and they employ over 60% of the population. We have a highly informal sector in Ghana and in Africa in general. By creating companies that employ in the formal sector you actually unlock that potential. It’s crucial because there’s a huge opportunity in our part of the world. By 2050 one out of four people will be African, and one out of three young people will live in Africa as well. The Global North is shrinking. The global majority is growing, and Africa has a huge potential to unlock its human capital so job creation needs to follow through as well too. That’s the first thing I wanted to say. 

The second thing is, if you take a look at OECD countries the tax-to-GDP ratio is around 36%. If you take a look at countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s 18% – and if you take a look at countries like Ghana, Nigeria, and any of the countries that have extractive economies like Angola, South Africa, it’s as low as 6%. Our governments make money from extractives. They sell extractives. For example, if you have a chocolate bar, the cocoa probably comes from Ghana. Gold, oil are other examples. But what’s very important is diversifying that revenue for governments. Our taxpayer base is very, very, very narrow, so part of additional revenue is generated by generating and supporting small businesses. They are the drivers of revenue for the government. We’re talking corporate tax, we’re talking income tax, we’re talking VAT [value-added tax], we’re talking everything that is collected through those small businesses. 

The other thing that’s super important about this tax, the thing that I’m kind of obsessed with, which forms the majority of that OECD 36% tax-to-GDP ratio that I talked about, is that it creates accountability between civilians and their governments. If I buy a bottle of water and I’m poor, I’m rich, I’m paying the same amount of VAT. It’s indirect and it’s regressive, right? But if I’m earning an income or I’m a small business owner and I pay tax, there is a fiscal contract between me and my government. I’m paying money to you, for you, to provide you with a service that doesn’t really exist in that part of the world, because of the hugely informal sector. So if we see an element of formalization, and I don’t know what that looks like, and I’m not here to villainize the informal sector, you know, or romanticize them, but they’re a huge part of our economy. But over time, if we see an element, basically, of formalization and an increase in the taxpayer base, and an increase in direct taxation as well, too. I would like to think that there would be more civilian accountability to leaders in the continent as a result.

…

Owen Haywood: How have you worked to bridge your diverse array of interests and experiences throughout your career?

Tarek Mouganie: I guess my life and my career only makes sense now looking backwards and trying to connect the dots – I think Steve Jobs said that, right? But in the middle of it all, I wasn’t really thinking. I knew I wanted to work in investment management. It was actually a friend from university that said, “Oh, I work for this company. Why don’t you consider joining?” And I thought, “hey, sounds great. I’ll give it a shot.” You know, what’s the worst that could happen? I would fail. I would move on with my life. And then when I left, the idea of starting a bank was out of coincidence, because I’d spent all this time, even though it wasn’t intentional, working in financial services, investing in banks, and understanding banking strategy. I think it only makes sense looking backwards at it.

The only kind of advice that I can give is not to take things too seriously. I’ve had a lot of students reach out to me here [to network], which is somewhat disappointing. Like 20 years ago, when I did my undergrad degree, everyone would go into investment banking and work for like a consultancy firm. I thought those days were over. surely there are other options out there, you know. And I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with being an investment banker or, you know, or working for a consultancy firm. I did in the past, too. But don’t be afraid to make mistakes in the early stages of your career. You have chances to mess up and correct them later in your career, and when you make a mistake earlier, it’s a lot less grave than it is in the later stages of career. 

But what I wanted to say is stay curious, don’t lose that. Think to yourself, “What is your North Star?” If you want to fix health care, if you want to fix inclusion, if you want to work in the field of climate justice or whatever, why do you care about that? Which part of the value chain do you care about as well, too? And how do you start thinking through how to get to a situation where you think you can maximize your impact. Whether it’s working for a consultancy firm, fine, as long as you’re aware of that and getting the right skill set. Whether it’s working for an established startup where you get a ton of exposure because you want to be an entrepreneur yourself, or whether it’s working for a corporation that has a department in there that looks at sustainability, is also another option. Just make sure that you have all the options laid out to stay curious and always question everything.on, if you want to work in the field of climate justice or whatever, why do you care about that? Which part of the value chain do you care about as well, too? And how do you start thinking through how to get to a situation where you think you can maximize your impact. Whether it’s working for a consultancy firm, fine, as long as you’re aware of that and getting the right skill set. Whether it’s working for an established startup where you get a ton of exposure because you want to be an entrepreneur yourself, or whether it’s working for a corporation that has a department in there that looks at sustainability, is also another option. Just make sure that you have all the options laid out to stay curious and always question everything.

Image courtesy of the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs

Odd Arne Westad is a Norwegian scholar of modern international and global history, with a specialization in the history of Eastern Asia since the 18th century. He is the Elihu Professor of History at Yale. Westad has published sixteen books, most of which deal with twentieth century Asian and global history. Westad joined the faculty at Yale after teaching at the London School of Economics, where he was School Professor of International History, and at Harvard University, where he was the S.T. Lee Professor of US-Asia Relations.  He is a fellow of the British Academy and of several other national academies. He is also the co-author of The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform, which will be published on October 29th, 2024.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Abdulkadir: Your scholarship spans a lot of topics, different periods of time, and a number of different countries and contexts, including imperialism and Cold War tensions. Could you give an outline of what drew you to many of these different research topics and how you found that your scholarship interests have changed over the course of your career?

Professor Westad: It’s really hard to do that because there is no logic that developed from the very beginning with regard to this. I wouldn’t say that it’s totally accidental, but it certainly developed in ways that I would never have foreseen.

After I graduated from college, I spent some time working for different kinds of volunteer organizations. I did lots of work with refugees, and for part of that time, I was in Africa and South Asia. I think I got an interest during that period to try to understand why things from the ground — in the areas I was working with — looked the way they looked and were the way they were. When I was there and trying to deal with some of these issues that were highly complicated and quite difficult for the people who were involved, with large-scale refugee movements and disasters, maybe coming out of political [unknown word – organizations?]. 

So I got an interest in that, in terms of trying to explain why the world looks the way it does. I think that’s what moved me to become a historian, because I was interested in the past, so how our world today was created by decisions that were taken in some cases quite long ago, and people’s choices that were taken a considerate time in the past. So that I think was the general, kind of movement for me into becoming a historian and working on history.

Then I was always interested in languages, but that was sort of a different strain, with regards to this. I studied in China for a while when I was in college and studied a little bit of Chinese. Then, many years later, I came back to using some of those languages I’d acquired for some of my purposes as a historian. But there was no plan in all of this. There was no sort of, you know, you have to do this in order to achieve that. Some of it was just happenstance.

I got really lucky when it came to my interest in the Cold War because I had some of the necessary language skills to get into archives and collectives when they started to open up as the Cold War came to an end, in the late 80s and early 1990s. When we could access material that we’d never thought we’d be able to see before. In order to do that, you had to have, first and foremost, certain language skills in order to use these materials. I was lucky enough to have them. So, that in a way propelled me into writing more, or being able to write more in-depth about some of the issues I’d been preoccupied with since the very beginning, like the effect of the Cold War divisions on the Global South, why so many people on a global scale ended up first colonized and then even after decolonization, being under the predominance of other countries? So, you know, those were the kind of connections that were there.

Abdulkadir: That’s really interesting. I think it’s interesting, in general, how language has really shaped your historical interests. Did you find, especially when studying documents in different languages, that there were inherent changes, in terms of the effect of language on documenting history?

Professor Westad: That’s a really good question. Yeah, I think being able to read in the original, talks about how different concepts have been developed, getting more of an understanding of the links between them and links between different peoples and how they understood themselves and each other. Yes, I think that plays a role. 

I was just advising a student for their senior essay earlier today, and she’s working on the history of China, a small era of China, during the early Reform Era. We were talking about how important the concepts that they used in Chinese were, how people understood them, and sometimes how the meaning of these concepts would change. You can’t be alert to that significance without knowing the language. You can’t do that with translation, however good and imaginative a historian or political scientist you are.

Sivakumar: So, correct me if I’m wrong, you studied in China in the mid-1970s?

Professor Westad: Yes, late 70s. I came there as a student in 1979.

Sivakumar: Would you say your firsthand experience witnessing such a pivotal period in Chinese history impacts your research and teaching today?

Professor Westad: Yes, I think it does. I mean, in many different ways. First and foremost, I’ve been lucky enough to see how China has developed, from a dirt-poor and terrorized country as it was after the Cultural Revolution up to what it is today. So, that trajectory has been very important for me. I’m just publishing a book now this year with a colleague and friend of mine which is a history of that transformation in its early phases, it’s a history of China from the late sixties to mid-eighties. Interestingly enough, right in the middle of that, is the period when I first came to China, which of course is no accident, I wanted to find out more about that time period and what really happened.

But drawing that up to today, I think it’s really important that we think about when we think about China now, and many things that are wrong with China at the present time, and I’ve written quite a bit about some of these. But for the Chinese people, to be able to go through that transformation, from the generation that lived years ago, up until now, is, of course, seen by them as an enormous achievement, an enormous set of steps forward. 

For almost everyone, not absolutely everyone, there are still people who have not been part of this, but for a very large group of people, particularly those who live in cities or near the eastern seaboard, where most families now live, this has been a huge transformation. Many Americans do not always realize that for the current regime in China, there’s that achievement of having gone from being very poor to moderately wealthy, where you can aspire things for your children and grandchildren. It’s important to bear that in mind. When we think of China today, that transformation should be the first thing that we think about.

Abdulkadir: Following up with that question, regarding your scholarship relating to Chinese history, how has your scholarship’s lenses focused on Chinese imperialism and the greater effects of imperialism on Asia shaped your perceptions of colonialism and imperialism overall? Especially in a comparative sense with the European case, which I think is focused on a lot more especially in the United States.

Professor Westad: Exactly. So, I think, when I teach that here at Yale, that’s one of the things I’m really interested in, is making those comparisons. I teach a class, an undergraduate seminar, on empires and imperialisms since the 1840s, and then that final “s” in imperialisms is very much a signal of how we teach this, because not all imperialisms are the same, or carried out in the same kind of way. 

It’s also really important to focus on non-European empires. Obviously I think the Chinese empire is perhaps one of the most relevant today. But also say, other empires that have existed over time, going way back into history, we can look at lots of empires and imperial formations that are not European in origin, and I think that’s very significant.

So, that’s not the same thing as saying that you… It’s an instrument to figure out what’s at the core of many forms of European imperialism. It helps in understanding what is distinctive about European imperialism, in a comparative sense. 

So, what’s distinctive to me about European imperialism as it came out of Europe [some additional words] and the nineteenth century is that it went from what I sometimes call the ‘smash and grab’ version of empire, meaning you take over someone’s country, you occupy it, and exploit the people and resources as best you can, making that the foundation of imperial foundations. There was still much of that coming into the 20th century as well, with European empires, but in addition to that, there were also these ideas about other forms of control and reform and improvement and race, to a very high extent, concepts of racial hierarchies and which countries and which peoples were able to achieve it. I mean, it was quite a new form of thinking about how empires were constructed. But I think you see that much more clearly if you compare non-European empires to European empires, and if you compare between countries. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do in some of my more recent work, is how some of those transformations took place.

Sivakumar: How do you think that the Cold War has informed what kind of empire the United States aspires to be?

Professor Westad: I think much of what the United States is today as an imperial formation comes out of the Cold War. it has deeper roots than that, it does go back, in my view, to the very start of the United States, it was born an empire, and most Americans would vigorously disagree with that. But it was born an empire because the whole idea was about expansion into territories that were not held by white Americans, or Americans of Anglo-Saxon origin mainly when this country was set up. It was based on the idea, that it was built into the promise of this new country, that it was eventually become a nation that had pre-dominance over others through westward expansion. 

I think it’s very important to bear that in mind, the Cold War to me, is more or less synonymous with the period where the United States comes to global power, right, I tend to date the Cold War as an ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism going back to the very late nineteenth century. 

So it sort of fits in, as you might have already guessed, with what I’d been saying earlier about the transformation of European imperialisms because what the United States then did is that it took over many of those new imperial concepts, including concepts of race and reform and improvement and controlling others, so that they themselves, the colonized peoples, became part of creating societies that were more similar to that of the United States. To me, the Cold War was very much about that. 

Now, the United States was not the only one or only country behaving like that but it was by far the most powerful country behaving in that kind of manner. In that sense, you could say that at least for the first generation or so after the Cold War very little changed in terms of that American approach. The Cold War as a bipolar international system and ideological conflict more or less went away, it’s an open question of how we should see our open rivalry with China today. But, the basics of the US approach to the world did not change very much. So, in that sense, I think understanding the Cold War era is essential for understanding where the United States is today.

Abdulkadir: I think it’s very interesting that you discuss the US’ economic position post WWII informed the Cold War. How would you say, when twenty years later, we reached the decline of what some may call that ‘American hegemony,’ or the rise of multiple strong economies of the world, how would you say that idea of interstate competition especially in an economic sense fundamentally changed the sphere of diplomatic relations?

Professor Westad: So, it’s been very hard I think, for historians and social scientists to get into the transformations that happened as the Cold War came to an end and was being replaced by a set of international systems that we still don’t even know what to call, we call it the post-Cold War era, with the Cold War being gone now for much more than a generation. So, that in itself is a signal that we don’t quite understand how many of these connections are set up.

I’ve started to think that maybe in terms of historical understanding, we make a little bit of too much of the dividing line for the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was significant, significant for a lot of people in different parts of the world, including Americans, especially for Russians and Europeans and people in South Asia and South Africa and elsewhere. It had a massive impact, but if we think of that dividing line in terms of structural changes in the global economy, that didn’t happen then. That happened well before then, and I think for this the 1970s is the critical decade when American capitalism went global.

Much more happened, obviously, than that, but that’s at the core of what we later on started calling globalization. That takes place during the 1970s. It was a massive expansion of financial capital, on a global scale, and much of that was intimately connected to what happened in economic and international terms, in the United States. 

Up until then, the United States in many ways had been a significant international economic power, but it hadn’t been a predominant economic power. After the 1970s, that changes, and in many ways, that’s the culmination to me, of a period of unique American predominance. That probably lasted up to, you know, the late 2000s. 

Some people would say that the global financial crisis of the late 2000s (2008/2009), was the sort of dividing line, and after that, both because of the growth of China and what was happening domestically in the US, we are moving much more towards a multipolar terms, in economic, diplomatic, and political terms.

Broadly speaking, I agree with that, though it’s very hard to do immediate contemporary history because there are so many things that you don’t see. What is clear to me is that the process of moving from what could be seen as a unipolar kind of system, which if my interpretation here is correct, didn’t really last too long, overall to a more multipolar system, is now underway. We’re now at the end of that process here. It seems to me, very clearly, that we are moving in that direction. 

Abdulkadir: Going along with that idea, of considering these concepts in the present and future, to what extent would you say the dispersal of economic strength and development globe is an inherent building block (or connects to) the idea of equal and non-exploitative international/diplomatic relations?

Professor Westad: That depends entirely on how the system will develop in the future. It’s not given that if you have, at the government or state level, more of an impact on other states and countries, most of which themselves also tend to be either former or current empires, you’ll have international economic development, or that will make it more diverse or democratic, in a sort of popular sense. 

I think it’s important to note that states are not people. You can have a tremendous dispersal of economic power, which I think in some ways makes for an international system in which more people have more of a say, which is a good thing, but that’s still not the same thing as some sort of democratization of the system.

Because, the new countries, with China being a very good example of this, that seem to increase their economic power very dramatically also in many ways, certainly do not become more participatory or democratic. They’re sort of moving in the opposite direction. That’s a big question mark, and I think some of those who celebrate the transformation of the global economy in the direction of making it more multipolar, perhaps also more integrated, perhaps not in a globalization context but in a sort of sense of different kinds of supply chains being more involved, in many ways, on a global scale. They miss the point that this is not necessarily an enormous advantage for people who live in these countries.

So, this idea that other countries, especially countries in the global South, are less exploitative towards the working class and young people who come into an open setting as first generation, that is something I don’t believe in very much. I’ve seen enough of how tremendously exploitative the Chinese economic transformation was in the 1980s and 1990s.

Sivakumar: Do you think that the upcoming 2024 US presidential election will impact American hegemony or the shift towards a more multipolar world?

Professor Westad: It’s reasonable, I think, to believe that it will impact that transformation. I think the overall framework, with regards to the nation, with the kinds of debates you have in this country leading up to the election, including the positions of the leading candidates themselves, will certainly in the minds of people of the world, foster this idea that the United States, relatively speaking, is in decline. I think you can already see that. 

This country has had a tremendous ability to re-invigorate and transform itself, though it’s very hard to see how that can happen being led by octogenarian presidents who do not really seem to have many new ideas about how the transformation of the United States should take place.

There are interesting elements in it, I’ve often thought about this, and that the Trump phenomenon has many interesting and scary substances. One that is not often dwelled upon is the movement towards much more limitations in terms of the use of American power, that Trump at least rhetorically stands for. I think that’s an interesting sort of line of development. Much of the critique of the American role in the world, in a broader sense, and the American overextension in terms of its involvement in the world, has traditionally come from the left, particularly in the latter part of the Cold War. It was perhaps a little bit different during the 1940s and the early 1950s. Now it’s coming back in full force from the right, and that’s an interesting sort of juxtaposition. 

It seems to me that many people who are skeptical of the idea that the United States should operate as a sort of world police on a broad scale, in statist terms, are not willing enough to engage with some of the issues that come out of the Trumpist rhetoric with regards to this. Maybe because they don’t believe that the candidates actually represent those kinds of values, which would be fair enough, but it’s a little bit too easy to say that. Because, I do think that people who voted for Trump, many of them do have quite seriously in mind, where they are worried about lack of attention to what is going on at home, and an overextension of US power into the world overall. I regret that former president Trump has become the mouthpiece for these kinds of issues, but that;s not the same thing as saying I don’t think these are issues that should be discussed. They are important issues. 

Abdulkadir: That’s very interesting. Moving back to the idea of the Cold War, the ideology of Cold War politics is often associated with this idea of ‘moral absolutism,’ or the notion that one side believed they had a correct ideology, with the other side’s ideology being evil or completely incorrect. Would you say, in your research across various periods, that there are other periods of global history or more narrow events that reflect a similar relationship between the ideas of morality and politics?

Professor Westad: I think it’s not uncommon that you have links between, in ideological terms, morality and politics. I think it was particularly strongly expressed during the Cold War. The way I explain that, is that it is mainly because both of the two major powers during the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union, both sort of built this into the version of modernity that they wanted to present to the world, that they were modern, hyper-modern some people would say, and standing for transformation in global societies. But on a kind of, righteous, morally correct ground, you know. So, what they both tried to promise to the world, in slightly different ways, is that you could be modern and just at the same time. You could have a morally satisfactory framework for not just society but for human existence in general, and at the same time become rich and strong. Which is a very alluring promise.

Now, you have had this before. British imperialism, I think back in the 19th century had some of those same ideas connected to it. But, they were carried out, at least to begin with, in a very different kind of way, in the sense that the idea was not to have that kind of option open for everyone, because there was a very sternly held idea that these kinds of transformations in groups and peoples that were subject to British power would take time, several generations, if at all.

The US and Soviet models promised almost instantaneous transformations of societies if these societies were willing to adhere to the critical and moral standards that these two countries set forth. In almost all cases, this turned out to be a false promise, but you can see how people were attracted to it. I think that gave much of the Cold War competition its power, but also, with regard to nuclear weapons, there were a number of incredible dangers present during the Cold War. Because, when presented in this kind of way, the issues of societal transformation, the stakes become very, very high. Not just for people living in the United States and Soviet Union, but for anyone who adhered to the ideas of one or the other of these political superpowers, in one direction, or the other.

You could come to the conclusion that if someone tried to hijack or change your modernization project, threatening them with absolute destruction, annihilation, and the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction would be justified because the stakes were so high. It was not just about yourself, but about the future of the world. And that, to me, is one of the scary aspects of the Cold War, is what people felt they were justified to do or plan for because of the correctness and the righteousness of their ideas.

Sivakumar: Is the current rivalry between China and the United States less ideological?

Professor Westad: Yes, I think it is less ideological in the sense that there is no fundamental disagreement about how the economy and human societies that come out of that economy should be organized. There are variations, I mean, clear variations in terms of the significance and role of the government, in terms of directing the markets, directing the capitalist development that takes place. There is the fundamental disagreement about whether economic development should be driven by markets or not. I think the Chinese government, whatever else it thinks about in terms of its own power, does not believe like the Soviets believed, that you had to destroy the global markets, you had to destroy capitalism, in order for the country to be successful. So in that sense, it is less immediately ideological. 

There are ideological elements in it. And of course, in political terms, if you make a sort of transition, ideology is always in the eyes of the beholder. I can see how it’s possible now in this country, or elsewhere, to present China as being tremendously ideologically different. It’s led by a Communist Party, echoes of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and a Communist Party that quite consistently over the last decade at least, has seen the United States as enemy number one, so you can see how those kinds of connections can be improved. But I think this is a very different kind of setup from what you see during the Cold War. 

I think the main reason for me saying that it’s not so much ideology, I think that matters, but more multipolarity. I think that the Cold War, certainly at its peak, was relentlessly bipolar, both ideologically and in terms of state competition. We’re not moving in a more bipolar direction. Now with regard to the United States and China, I think over the last few years, maybe especially over the last year, people have come to realize that more. I mean, I think, up to relatively recently, a lot of people, particularly those who don’t spend much time thinking about history, were sort of thinking that the United States and China would be the two poles of development within a new global system. Now, I think that has become a much more difficult position to hold because what is actually happening, certainly, in terms of the global economy at the moment, is not as many people believe that China and the United States both at once… you have the United States advancing more than China. On the contrary, it seems to me that both of them are certainly, with regard to some of the key economic issues, falling behind other countries that are developing faster. We look at India, and Southeast Asia, which are much more centers of development now than, in my view, both China and the United States. And I don’t think that trend is going to change for the next generation. So we have to get used to that. 

There is a danger. There is a built-in idea in the human mind that we compare to what sort of immediately went before us, right, and very often see a kind of continuation from what went before. And of course, there are elements of that. So we started talking about how there are elements of the Cold War that created the world we live in today. I think that’s absolutely true. But today’s world will not be a repeat of the Cold War. I mean, that’s a historical fallacy to believe that that’s how things work. This is why history as an object of study is actually quite helpful because it alerts us to the fact that there were developments going on on a global scale well before we were born, so outside their own experience, and that some of those might have more in common with what we see today than what the experienced past have. 

So I think, for instance, that today’s world, in terms of how it’s developing, not least diplomatically, sort of internationally, has more in common with the late 19th century than what it has with the Cold War. I think that’s tremendously important because then we have to learn how to handle a very different kind of setup than what was the case during the Cold War. And you have to learn that fast because the outcome of the experience from the late 19th century was not a particularly happy one. So we need to take some of the lessons coming out of that time period and try to apply them today.

Abdulkadir: I think it’s very interesting that you mentioned the way that the late 19th century perhaps informs or is less focused on and how it informs the present. I guess I would be interested in hearing more about what has led you to draw that conclusion. Also, with regards to the case of Chinese history, how do you think that its history of domination by other foreign powers or foreign occupation informed the formation of the People’s Republic, and also informs Chinese history today? And do you think that idea holds with regard to Chinese history in terms of the influence of the late 19th century?

Professor Westad: Both of these are good questions. On the first one, with regard to similarities between the late 19th century and now, there are many that come to mind. One is multipolarity. That was, in reality, the last time when we had a multipolar international system where there were not two hegemonic powers that developed independently of each other, but with the sub-summation of everything else and everyone else within the framework. The other similarities, so exactly the one that your second question points to, within that international system, there was one power that grew, up to a point at least, much more quickly than what others did. 

Back in the 19th century, that was Germany, and imperial Germany, and up to quite recently in our time it’s been China. So one of the big problems, I think, for everyone, whatever angle you have to this, in the late 19th century was figuring out, you know, how do you integrate? In Germany in economic terms? Into a world of already established powers? Most of which were European. Right? So how do you actually do that? And is it possible to find a way in which you can integrate a rapidly rising power into an already existing system so that that power, elites get the impression that they at least have a fighting chance of being respected as an equal power? 

That was a huge problem in the late 19th century. A substantial reason, in my view, why the First World War happened, and what happened the way it happened, right, is that the German elites, which were increasingly a significant part of the population, because Germany went through some form of pluralism and democratization. Towards the end of its existence as an imperial state, these groups felt that they were never integrated into the global economy on an equal basis. I think a lot of people on the Chinese side today, even people outside the Communist Party, feel that that is also true for China. China has had, and we started talking about this, enormous breakthroughs but hasn’t really gotten to the point of power or respect or influence, internationally, that goes with that new power position. 

Now, I sort of hoped that in the 100, 150 years since we saw that development taking place, mainly in Europe, and mainly among European imperial powers, we would have learned something about how we can avoid those kinds of situations. But it seems to me now that we have learned very little. The state of conflict between the United States and China doesn’t seem to me to draw in any meaningful sense on the experiences of the late 19th century. Understand how incredibly important it is to keep China integrated to make it more integrated in many ways into the global economy. In order to forestall the kind of sense that the country will forever be left on the outside and forever will be seen as a threat and as a challenger.

That goes back to how we understand Chinese history. I think there are two things that are very important but we have to distinguish between them. The first one is that you know, China itself was an empire to begin with. Some people would say that China is an empire today. I probably agree with that, broadly speaking. It is an empire with a very large majority population that I would normally call Chinese, but now often call themselves Han. But it’s still an empire in the sense that its borders look very much like the borders of the Qing Empire. It includes a lot of people who are not Chinese in terms of origin. Maybe not large groups numerically but still significant groups of people. Now, what’s interesting is that the current regime in China keeps referring to this period of national humiliation when the last Chinese Empire, the Qing Empire, lost out to other more powerful empires elsewhere. It’s understandable that that will seem, you know, a period of decline and humiliation. On the other hand, you know, for a lot of ordinary Chinese, getting away from their own empire was seen, you know, the Qing Empire, was seen as a bit of liberation. At the time, they didn’t want more state power, they probably wanted less of it. And for non-Chinese Peoples within the Qing empire, there’s probably even more. So I think what has to qualify this idea for China’s humiliation by saying that, you know, this was one empire in conflict with other empires. They lost out, and then it led to a lot of dislocation and difficulties for China as a state. It was reconstructed under communist leadership in ways that I think most Chinese at least at the time welcomed, because, by that time, they were sick and tired of chaos and, of foreign predominance and influence. 

But we have to be careful buying that whole package, this idea that China today, somehow, you know, has broken free of its imperial past, and that humiliation was a specific humiliation of Chinese by foreigners. I think that’s the problem with that kind of account. For many people inside China, that wasn’t exactly the way it looked like. But, you know, you can understand, in sort of propaganda terms, how significant this is, right, and how you can set out that we were weak, now we are strong. We were downtrodden by others and now we are equal status with them. Again, it reminds me a little bit of the German Imperial merit in the late 19th century, I mean, that has some of the same elements to it. Not so much the interwar period, I mean, the Nazi period. That’s, I think, profoundly different. But if you think about this in a 19th-century context, there are some very striking similarities.

Sivakumar: Do you think that China’s experience as a rising power bears any lessons for other developing states, especially those in South and Southeast Asia?

Professor Westad: I think it does. I mean, I think one of the key issues to pick up, which is China’s biggest problem today, is to figure out how you can make your country more pluralistic while you are going through economic change. I mean, this Chinese idea, Chinese communist idea, of waiting, if you interpret this charitably, waiting with political reform, political change, until the economic transformation has actually taken place, doesn’t seem to me to be a very good idea. Because what you do is that you just put a lid on a lot of tensions within the country, not East Coast-based tensions, in my view, that do not have any meaningful outlet. And that’s not a good thing, you know, for any society. So I think, you know, this is one of the biggest questions, I think, in our time in terms of economic growth, not to learn the wrong lessons from the Chinese experience.

And it seems to me that maybe the jury is out, though, when I think about India, not even so sure about that. Or this issue of understanding that it is a strength for a country to celebrate this pluralism at the same time as it goes through economic transformation, and not move more in the direction of autocracy. Because you think that will deliver economic reform? I don’t think that was even true in China. I don’t think that there is a connection between China being a political dictatorship and its economic success. I think it depends on the people who are in power and how they want to carry out the kinds of reforms that are there. But this idea that political participation and democracy are somehow not possible under no circumstances or political or economic change or government reform. I think that’s misguided. There’s no historical evidence for that.

Abdulkadir: Discussing more the link between the Chinese development case and developing countries today, do you have any observations about the emerging dynamics between China and a lot of sub-Saharan African nations, especially I think a lot of their economic relations that are developing relating to debt and resource exchange?

Professor Westad: Yes. So I think one has to look again at different aspects of this. So at the outset, I think it is, it’s good for Africa that there is no longer just one game in town in terms of economic development, which is Western-based capitalist development. So the fact is, especially with regard to credit and technology, to some extent, that China is now more active with regard to Africa, in many ways should be welcomed. Of course, not from a US strategic perspective. But if you look at it from an African perspective, I think that’s, that’s in many ways a clear advantage. 

But all of this depends on how it is being carried out. And that depends much more in my view on the African countries than what it depends on China because China’s modus operandi here is, is very much based on its own economic interest. I mean, not in a sort of cohesive Chinese strategies sense always, but certainly with regard to the very big Chinese companies that are involved with regard to this. These companies, whether they are Chinese state-owned or not, doesn’t matter very much, have their own, you know, financial interests, economic interests, that are invested in the relationship with Africa, especially in terms of resource extraction of various sorts. So all the African countries have to do is to regulate the access that these companies like any company, whether it’s Chinese or American or European have to their market and the circumstances under which this happens, to avoid what Africa has suffered so often from in the past, forms of neo-imperialist exploitation. 

That’s not a bad term for it, I mean, basically means that foreigners who have held political power in Africa before now continue to have economic power, because they have a monopoly position in terms of resource trade or resource extraction, and one has to avoid moving in the direction that happens with Chinese companies or Chinese interests. Most African countries, in my view, have both the capability and the resources and intellectual wherewithal to handle that. They also understand, I think, sometimes much more acutely than the Chinese do, that sovereignty, trumps economic interest. So the idea that if an African country takes even substantial loans from China, that would mean that as a country the whole future will be beholden to China. That’s not necessarily true. But of course, it depends on the degree.

If you do make the serious mistake of making your country’s economy entirely dependent on Chinese markets or on Chinese loans, then of course, you put yourself in a difficult position. My impression is that most African countries, not all, most African countries, and their leaderships have learned from earlier experience with Western dependency, that they will not put themselves in that position again. If they do, then the existence of competing interests in terms of getting access to African raw materials and provinces probably would be a good idea. We also say about Africa, that what I think is often misunderstood about Africa is just how high in many countries in Africa’s own rate of development is.

I firmly believe that over the next generation, probably two generations, the continent in which we will see the highest growth rates will be Africa. There is one obvious reason for that. This year, all of the world’s natural population increase happens in Africa, there is not a single country outside of the African continent that has a natural increase in its population. Population still goes up sometimes, but the population growth rate goes down in all countries, except in Africa. It’s hard when you think about this as a historian not to see this as an enormous advantage. I mean, if you are in countries that have, what I would call a natural population growth rate, you have a population where young people are increasingly better educated, better fed, and more knowledgeable than what was the case in the past. And in competitive terms, particularly when everyone else seemed to be either on a catastrophic demographic decline, like in China, or a sliding demographic decline as in a few other countries. Many African countries, if they manage this well, have enormous development advantages that you don’t find elsewhere.

Sivakumar: What kind of foreign policy do you think is necessary for the United States to counter both Chinese and Russian influence in Africa?

Professor Westad: Keeping up regular trade, regular investments with African countries, making sure that African countries in terms of their production get access to the very attractive American and American-related markets overall, on equal terms, which has not always been the case in the past. That is the secret with regard to this. This idea that the United States is there for military and security purposes, and China is there for economic purposes, is a kind of equation that the United States is going to lose out on because economic development to most countries in Africa is far more important than the security aspects.

Security is important as well, particularly if you’re in a coup situation, but not very many African countries are. The overall security situation with a few exceptions, as we know with the African continent, is actually reasonably good. So what the United States needs to do is to put much more emphasis on the economic aspect of this, which also, interestingly, given what they said about demographic developments, will also be to the US’s advantage, in many ways.

Abdulkadir: Yeah, it’s interesting talking now about the sub-Saharan African case, because you’ve talked a lot about how the unification or rise of new states like Germany and China has sort of shifted the political sphere. Do you think that we are going to see similar dynamic changes today? Or we’re already seeing them in terms of the challenge of integrating a lot of the new developing nations? Or giving them the integration that they’ve long been denied in terms of the global political sphere?

Professor Westad: That’s again, a very, very good question. I think we are in the middle of trying to handle that process now. In my view, it’s not always being handled well. This again goes to the learning aspect that we talked about with regard to China, you know, the lessons coming out of the 19th and early 20th century. It seems to me that when it comes to the rest of the post-colonial world, some of those same mistakes are being repeated. Again, we already talked about the economic aspects of this, which are not all that dissimilar from Africa. With regard to the rest of the Global South, Africa of course is in a particular position, because it needs economic development more than almost anywhere else, in part because of the population increases. But it’s true sort of all over. Much of this has to do with the rest of the world getting, you know, a fair say in terms of how the global economy is handled. That’s the problem. 

Some people would say, well, that’s a problem inherent to a capitalist economic system. To some degree, I would agree with that. But at the same time, we do have international institutions and organizations that over now at least three generations have ameliorated and fashioned how the global economy works. The problem is that over the past half-generation or so, some of these international multinational organizations have become less and less powerful and less than less influential. So the kind of gradual integration of equal terms, or newly developing economies is something that in many ways is harder now than it was a generation ago.

That’s a big question for me. That’s a big worry because I think a lot of the political and diplomatic clashes and conflicts that we have seen come out of these perceptions of injustice in economic and social terms. We’ve seen that again and again. We saw it during the colonial era, we saw it in the immediate post-colonial era, and I think we’re seeing it again today in this sense, not just in terms of actual immediate economic changes but in terms of the overall system, that it’s unfair, and that it works on behalf of the West, and it doesn’t really work that well for the rest of the world. Not being able to bridge those kinds of perceptions is really very dangerous in the modern world, not only because of conflict but also because it leads to the perception of a kind of disequilibrium, in terms of the global economy, and that’s not good for people who want to, if you think about it in capitalist terms, people who want to invest on equal terms. If you think that the whole global economic system is sort of rigged, in a way with regard to this, that’s not what you’re going to do.

Image courtesy of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

Howard Brush Dean III is an American physician, author, consultant, and retired politician who served as the 79th governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003 and chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009. Dean currently serves on the Board of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a democracy building organization chaired by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright. He is a Senior Fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Haywood: When most people hear Howard Dean, they think of you as someone with experience in domestic policy — as Governor of Vermont, obviously, as well as being the chairman of the Democratic National Committee [DNC] and your experience running for president in 2004. Can you talk about how you have since begun to transition towards working on issues of foreign policy?

Dean: That is a very interesting story. When Madeline Albright was head of the NDI [National Democratic Institute] I knew her, and when I was chairman of the DNC, Obama was about to be elected. I recognized how important it was for Obama to resurrect the American image abroad, especially after George W. Bush, who I personally liked but thought was a pretty awful president, as did most of the world – with the exception of the people who benefit from PEPFAR [U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief], which I think is a major international achievement, and getting the three Baltic countries into NATO, which turned out to be prescient given how the Russians are behaving. Anyways, so I as Chairman controlled roughly 600 tickets to the DNC, which usually go out to various politicos: I gave every one of them to Madeline Albright to distribute to ambassadors from around the world. I thought it was really important for people from around the world to see that America is back. You know, the international election to Obama’s election was extraordinary and it was because America is always expected to do unexpected things and break new barriers in ways that nobody else can. And that was a big barrier he broke.

Madeline eventually, when I left the DNC, asked if I would join the board of NDI. So I said of course, and I stayed there for probably 12 or 13 years. The European people all knew me because they didn’t like Bush and I was the only Democrat running for president in 2004 with the you-know-whats to take on the War in Iraq. Everybody, all the other top candidates voted for the war and voted for Bush’s tax cuts, which mostly benefited the top 10%. If the election had been held in Canada or Europe I might have won because they all knew me. So, I was well-known in Europe and had a lot of supporters, so they were thrilled to have me over there. I started in Eastern Europe – the NDI doesn’t do much work in the European Union, except for a few programs to deal with discrimination against the Roma people. But most of our work is on the fringes of the EU. I spent a lot of time in the Balkans, and I spent a lot of time in Ukraine, including coming in after the Maidan after the dust had settled. And from there, you know, we began to expand into Burma and other places.

Abdulkadir: Turning towards your time in the NDI doing work on integrating the Roma community into Eastern European politics, I’m curious to hear what you think the link is between integrating ethnic and gender minorities into the political mainstream and maintaining strong democratic institutions? Do you think one causes the other?

Dean: From a purely calculus point of view, if the minority is small, you can probably get away with abusing them. But from a human rights point of view, I don’t think any of us succeed in the world, any society succeeds, unless everybody succeeds. The long-term goal is to make sure everybody has human rights. Now the Roma are complicated. Many of them are living with 15^th century traditions, which may not be the healthiest environment for small children, as in they might not permit their kids to go to school. Not all Roma live in wagons or tents someplace, there are members of the German parliament, for example, who are Roma, but there are some communities in Eastern Europe that are very insular and removed. And the question is, how do you integrate them? There are Roma who have been successfully integrated into the political process in some places and can speak for their brethren. But there are also some members of the community who don’t want to be integrated. The trouble is, then, that if you don’t choose to be integrated then your kids can’t make a living and so have no choice but to live in conditions that might not be considered acceptable. So the big thing for us to do was foster programs for those who wanted to be more integrated and wanted to have a livelihood. We also tried to get local people not to “other” the Roma. The Roma are very famous for being “othered” throughout history. There has been a lot of scapegoating of them and their culture in Eastern Europe especially. The real guts of the problem is about trying to improve the lives of the Roma people without telling them how to live. And part of our role was to make sure the people who might be tempted to abuse the Roma understood that they were being watched by the United States.

Haywood: Can you talk more about your experience in Ukraine for a second?

Dean: Ukraine was wonderful. The first time we went there I think was after the overthrow of former President Viktor Yanukovych. And Yulia Tymoshenko and others were expected to run for president at that time. We met with someone called the “Minister of Lustration” which we had no idea what that was. Turns out, it was the minister who fights corruption – of which there was a great deal in Ukraine, as in most post-Soviet states. Well, it also turned out that he had no office, no staff, and no money. So we bought him a cup of coffee and that was our meeting with the Minister of Lustration. So we started at the bottom.

Then I did a lot of coaching of political parties in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, Georgia – I spent a lot of time in Georgia – Kosovo, and Armenia. To have a political party in a country that hasn’t had a real political party for generations is quite difficult. They don’t really understand everything that is involved. At one point I had a meeting with Tymoshenko (this was when Yanukovych was in power) and it was ten people around a table in a relatively small restaurant. Tymoshenko had the big game: when I sat down in front of her, she had my chair a little lower to the ground than hers. That’s a whole bunch of Washington crap but everybody does it, you know. I’m looking over her shoulder and I see Madeline Albright’s biography. Well, that didn’t get there by accident. They knew who I was, and who would be coming in, and so rearranged the books. I mean, this is the big game, right? So we’re sitting around this table in some fleabag-ish restaurant with all the political parties, there were about eight of them. The idea was to get them all together behind a candidate and then we’d challenge Yanukovych. None of the parties had any clue what they were doing except for Tymoshenko’s. So Tymoshenko’s person proposes we have a primary. I said “Great! How would you run that?”, since they had no experience in running primaries at the time. So he says “we’ll just have a poll and whoever leads the poll is the candidate.” But Tymoshenko had already been Prime Minister and so everyone knew who she was – she’d win easily. It was just ludicrous.

There was some real talent in Ukraine. One of the guys, who started a party of young people and had some enthusiasm – in addition to being the only person who understood organizations besides Tymoshenko. His name was Arseniy Yatsenyuk – he ended up becoming the Prime Minister of Ukraine. He had a real problem with corruption though and left after a couple of years. But then along comes Volodymyr Zelensky and along comes the Russians and the corruption gets rooted out and so forth. It is not totally rooted out now, but it is a democratic state. Kyiv is a modern city – it’s a lot like Berkeley in the 1960s. A lot of young people and coffee houses (except now the young people of computers, of course).

One of the most moving things that happened to me is that there was one guy at the end of our roundtable discussion that came up to me – he didn’t speak English, he had a translator who spoke only Russian. This was in 2014 after Putin had already illegally seized Crimea from the Ukrainians. He told me “I was raised by two good communists who taught me the Americans were the bad guys and the Russians were the good guys. I’m married to a Tatar, and we had to leave Crimea and she’ll never be able to go back and see her parents again as a result of this. So I just want to thank you for your support.” That kind of stuff makes it all worth dealing with. It’s the big picture and the diplomacy and all that. But stuff like that is what really matters: when you move people’s lives, that’s what matters.

We did the same thing in Burma. I knew about the persecution of the Rohingya long before anyone else I knew did because I did a meeting with young people in Yangon. The NDI always tried to meet with young people. And it was extraordinary – there was a civil war going on. This was followed by a peaceful transition to democracy. The civil war has since been rekindled when the military decided to become unpeaceful and untransition. Anyways, it was during the transition that I met with many young people. Obama was following me by a week (which terrified me because I have a penchant for speaking my mind and I was worried I was going to leave a mess for him. Luckily I didn’t). Among the young people there were members of every ethnic group in the country, and these ethnic groups had all been fighting each other for thirty years. What I discovered is they uniformly hated the Rohingya. I kept asking them all about it. Finally one of them got annoyed – which was surprising since it’s a very polite society, they certainly treat their elders more properly than the Americans do. But even they got upset sometimes. He said “how come you’re asking these difficult questions?” My answer was if you don’t ask difficult questions you don’t get truthful answers. But all of them, including all the minority groups that were being persecuted by the army, hated the Rohingya. It was really scary because usually what happens when I go to a country, I find the older folks have the same old ethnic hates they’ve always had but the younger folks are starting to get together and become less interested in these divisions. And that was not the case in what is now Myanmar.

Haywood: Why do you think that is? I’ve heard discussions of social media as having  a particularly bad effect on the conflict in Myanmar – do you think that’s the case?

Dean: Social media is a negative influence on any conflict because you get so much disinformation, and the people who are spreading the disinformation know how to appeal to the worst prejudices of people, and they know exactly where to hit them. That was part of it. Part of it probably was these kids have not had this much exposure, if any, to democracy. There had been a junta for years, and Aung San Suu Kyi had only been in power briefly before being deposed by the military. There’s lot of theories. The guy who took over after Ken Wallach as president of the NDI, Derek Mitchell, had been the ambassador when I was in Myanmar. Derek is just a stand-up guy who really understands all this stuff very well. He used to joke that the junta got tired of retirement and was looking for something to do so they decided to come back. That’s not exactly true but it seemed like it sometimes.

Tauch: I’m curious, besides Myanmar, what are your thoughts on democratic backsliding in Southeast Asia in general?

Dean: How about democratic backsliding in the United States of America? That’s not so great either! None of us are immune to appeals to people’s worst instincts instead of their best instincts. I’m worried about it. I spent a lot of time in Vietnam with NDI and IRI – the International Republican Institute.  Interestingly, both organizations were formed by the same legislation under Reagan, and we work in parallel (although they have a little more of an ideological agenda than we do). We sent a joint delegation to Vietnam. Vietnam is not a democracy. But it is also not as authoritarian and controlling as China. Especially the southern part of Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City is very lively. If you didn’t know you were in Vietnam, you would think you were in any big Asian city in a relatively free country. Vietnam is very business-oriented. When we would meet with the local and provincial and national officials, every one of them started out with a five-minute diatribe about how they were shooting at us 40 years ago, and then a 45 minute dialogue about how terrible the Chinese were. They had been paying tribute to the Chinese since 941 AD and the United States was only a relatively recent irritant. That’s why now Da Nang is the only port in the world that services both Russian and American naval vessels.

So our relationship with Vietnam is actually quite good.  Is it an authoritarian country? Yes. Do you get in trouble if you criticize the government? Yes. But is there free enterprise? Also yes. I would call it a thriving country, which we’re investing a lot in because it’s a friendlier environment than China right now for American companies. I won’t say it’s a good model, because it’s not a democracy, but I will say for all but a relatively small number of political dissidents, it’s a fairly safe country to make a living and have children in. 

The other funny thing about our trip to Vietnam was – and this was just like the United States – we’d go to see the big shots. And then we’d go down to their version of a county government, and all they would do is complain about the big shots. And then we’d go to the local people, living a village just like the United States except for everyone was speaking Vietnamese, and they’d all complain about the authorities and the counties and the government. They weren’t very measured with it. I don’t want to be a fool and say it’s a free society – it isn’t. But there’s a real spirit of capitalism in Vietnam and I’m guessing the government is a little bit behind where the people are.

There is a lot of rural poverty in Vietnam – which we weren’t shown much of on our visit there. The rural areas are different. I took the U.S. embassy staff out to dinner there and one of the things I heard from them is their main immigration situation is going out to the villages and seeing who really got married to who and who didn’t. Because of course if you’re an American citizen, which many Vietnamese people are after the Vietnam war, then you get to come over to America without any problem. But it turns out a lot of those “marriages” to U.S. citizens weren’t quite true – they would be married to someone else.

Haywood: Do you foresee a role the US should play in encouraging countries like Vietnam towards more liberal democracy? Or do you think we should be focusing on our own problems with democracy that you mentioned earlier?

Dean: Well, I think that we as a country have to be careful. I’m obviously in favor of democracy, absolutely in favor. But I think our efforts to influence that process in other countries depend on how much repression there is in that system. For example, I am much more worried about Uganda because of its murderous anti-gay policies than I am about Vietnam. Are there human rights violations in both places? Yes, there are. But we cannot force a government on every group of people in the world. So I think we have to be judicious in where we apply our efforts for democracy.

We just taught a class on Africa, I had a woman named Michelle Gavin come in and speak to my class, she was an ambassador to Botswana and now works for the Council on Foreign Relations. One of the things we talked about is how the United States recently cut the Ugandan government off from an African trade association over their persecution of gay Ugandans. But the hard question is: do you cut them off like that and punish them? Or keep them engaged and try to influence them? That’s a discussion you have to have, and the answer is not clear-cut. Policymakers have to ask themselves how many human rights violations and abuses they are willing to tolerate before disengaging. And it’s not universal. We put up with more human rights abuses in Egypt than we would in, say, Algeria. Why? Because Egypt is, from a strategic point, more important to us. So we give them tons and tons of money and they mostly align with our priorities. But at the same time they put a hell of a lot of people in jail just for trying to be democrats (small D).

Haywood: Switching gears for a minute here. Do you mind talking about Donald Trump and his effect on foreign policy both in and out of office?

Dean: Trump was a disaster. And he was a disaster for foreign policy – first because he was inconsistent. Second, he has an affinity for dictators that I don’t understand except that he’d like to be one himself. Third, he took away all of America’s leverage on the world stage because no leaders were able to take him seriously. His four years were tempered only by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who knew what they were doing, and some public servants who also knew what they were doing. I personally think he’s mislocated a couple of brain cells in general.

Haywood: I assume then you’re concerned about his intent for a second term?

Dean: Sure. Wouldn’t you be concerned if somebody openly advertises that we’re going to get rid of your democracy?

Haywood: Can you also talk about the general trends toward isolationism in the Republican Party that have expressed themselves more recently?

Dean: Well, we pay a price for isolationism every time we do it. We were isolationist after the First World War and got Nazi Germany as a result. You’re going to pay a much bigger price later if you choose not to be involved in the world now. Trump is known for that. I mean, in his hotel business he always had a policy of “take what you can now” and is paying for that in New York State Court. I grew up in New York and no real estate guy I know in New York will do any business with Donald Trump. His word is no good. But he has an incredible gift for grievance politics, and this is a good time for that in the world. But I think he’ll set the country back terribly if he’s elected, especially setting our international status back dramatically. Europe doesn’t like him. Guess what? Europe is pretty powerful these days. They can do without us if they have to, except in defense.

So yes, I’m concerned. But what I’m more concerned about is the failure of the Republican Party to stand up for the country. Republicans and Democrats, I always knew we’ve had disagreements about spending money on programs and things like that. But the disagreements ended when had to defend the country together. That’s gone now. Some elected officials are more afraid of Trump’s anger than they are of Putin. That is a gross misjudgment in a public servant. And there are a lot of those people in the Republican Party.

Haywood: On a related note, you mentioned Europe and our defensive relationships there. Can you talk about how perceptions and the role of NATO have changed since the end of the Cold War?

Dean: The attack on Ukraine has created a sense of solidarity among NATO countries, as well as better arming and a better approach to the budget. I think the countries of Europe understand now, too, that they’re going to have to pay more for their own defense. Europe’s coordination and NATO’s expansion has been very, very helpful. To have 800 miles of frontier with Russia that we didn’t have before is a big deal. But NATO has problems. We have dictators or wannabe dictators within the European Union – the Law and Justice Party (PIS) in Poland, which is the sitting party currently (and hopefully soon to be opposition) [Note: Since the recording of this interview, Polish national elections were held in which the PIS did not win a majority of seats.], and Viktor Orban in Hungary, who is a disaster.

Haywood: This is a broader question. From a high level, what do you think the goals or guiding principles of American foreign policy should be?

Dean: We need to encourage to the best of our ability, first of all, dealing with climate change, which is the biggest threat to the world right now. Second of all, we need to find ways to respect people that we didn’t use to respect. You know, we were never a quote-unquote, “colonial power”, but we acted like one using other methods than the British and the French and Spanish and so forth all did. This change is happening — it’s slow, and problematic sometimes in some countries, but it’s happening. When Ambassador Galvin, who I mentioned earlier, came to talk to my class, one of the things I said was I’m very hopeful this is going to be the African century. Everybody says, Oh, isn’t it going to be the Chinese century? What about the African century? Africa is going to become the most populated continent at some point. There is enormous capacity in that continent for creativity and development, and it ought to be our responsibility to provide reasonable, thoughtful help. Not that that process is going to be easy. I mean, South Africa is really scary considering the goodwill that’s been wasted by corruption and so forth after their incredible liberation. The EFF [Economic Freedom Fighters] there is terrifying though, they’re basically the Trump of the left. But it still is a democracy, which makes it stand out, and it is a multiracial society, which is terrific considering where that came from. So we need to be as helpful to South Africa as we possibly can.

You get a much better understanding of places and their complexity when you actually talk to people from there rather than talking to me. But I’ll share one story: NDI did an exercise with some southern African countries, which were fairly democratic. One of the problems in many democracies, including the United States, is that the major political parties don’t talk to each other. They look at each other as enemies. Particularly on their “home turf.” So the goal was to get members of the three largest political parties in each of the six countries we were working with. And one of the countries – Zambia – had just had an election. The top three officials of Zambia were women: the President was a woman, the attorney general was a woman and the chief justice was also a woman. Which is unfortunately unusual, especially in Africa. So we’re doing this roundtable with all the significant figures from each party and one of the men says “Well, what do you do if you have a woman who is the president who’s totally incompetent, and Chief Justice who doesn’t know anything about the law and an Attorney General who can’t win court cases?” And I said, “Oh, I understand just what your problem is, the women are behaving just like the men!” But working there was great.

Wright: I want to ask a little bit more about what you mentioned, about developing respect for people in areas of the world that previously America has not had so much respect for. We’ve been talking in this interview about the impact of domestic culture and politics on foreign policy, but I’m wondering about the opposite: what information comes from outside the United States into the US either by Americans or by people from other countries that can alter or deepen our understanding of foreign policy?

Dean: The answer to that is music. People will always write stuff, and the intellectuals will read it and everyone can “my-good-man” their way through cocktail hour and what not. But what really is changing is music. Especially in Africa – there’s this incredible fusion of Caribbean, black American, and more traditionally African music. It’s all over the place, and it’s really cool. That’s how you get understanding between people. Remember it’s the people that really matter, not so much the diplomats. The shared cultural stuff that’s happening more and more, that’s what I think is important.

Wright: Do you have any thought or opinions on the way the US has done cultural diplomacy in the past? Are there any strong cultural diplomatic initiatives you’ve seen, or is this something that will happen or perhaps happens best without the hand of government being involved?

Dean: It matters who the president is. Obama was great, especially regarding connections with Africa because of his personal ties there. And he hired some really great people who were able to reach out to various countries there. Obama appointed Patrick Gaspard, who was a big supporter of mine when I ran for president as well as a union guy for SEIU (Service Employees International Union), as ambassador to South Africa. Patrick is black, for context. That kind of representation and connection matters. And not only was Patrick a black diplomat in a majority black country, but this is also a guy who was a black union executive with one of the largest and most successful unions in the United States which matters because labor organizations in South Africa are very developed and an important issue. So Obama was able to pick Patrick as someone who transcended all the handshaking of the State Department and was able to form real bonds with the country and people he was assigned to.

Look, the State Department and diplomacy is important but it’s not everything. Culture and universities and student exchanges and music and kids staying at each other’s houses – that kind of thing is actually in the long run more important for building connections. Obviously, you need an experienced diplomatic corps so when the you-know-what hits the fan you know what to do. But the way people really get to know each other is to have, you know, student exchanges and things like that.

Tauch: What are your thoughts on the current conflict between Israel and Hamas as well as the Biden administration’s approach to the conflict? Can you discuss how the administration’s stance has changed from the start of the conflict until now?

Dean: I think Biden is moving in the right direction. To back up a bit, first I don’t think anyone is going to be able to solve this problem in the long run without a two-state solution. That’s going to require the United States to put pressure on Israel. Second, I’ve made my views on Benjamin Netanyahu well-known in the past. I don’t think he has served Israel well. Israel is in as much if not greater danger from internal threats than they are from terrorists, although I of course think Hamas is awful. I think Israel was better off when Yitzhak Rabin and even Shimon Peres were Prime Ministers than Israel is today, as the most right-wing government in Israeli has attempted to undermine Israeli law against the will of the people.

Many terrible things are going on in this conflict. One of the things I try to do is avoid focusing only on the terrible things without looking for a solution. People get incredibly emotional, as they very well should, about these tragedies, especially when they are close to home. But it’s hard to figure out what the hell to do to solve the problem when you’re clogged up with anger and fury. Before pontificating about which group is terrible or which isn’t, I try to look at the facts. Is Hamas a terrorist organization? Yes. Are they honest? Are they a good negotiating partner? No. Is there terrorism being perpetrated in the West Bank by the settlers? Yes. They’re shooting people and taking their land; that’s terrorism. So it’s a mess. It needs to be stopped: I’m in favor of the ceasefire, obviously. We need to get those hostages out; that has been happening, which is good. But in order for a long-term solution to take shape, the United States must insist on a two-state solution in a way that is fair for the Palestinians. Just for the record: Representative Rashida Tlaib, whom I have not met, was censored for saying “from the river to the sea” in reference to Palestine. You know who also used that phrase? Menachem Begin, when he was Israel’s Prime Minister. There’s two groups that want “from the river to the sea” but they don’t mean the same thing. In a long-run solution, no one is going to get everything they want.

Part of the problem is that, except for the Sadat-Begin agreement at Camp David (and Begin was pressured by Carter), we’ve never had good leadership on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict at the same time. That’s a travesty. That’s just been one of the tragedies of the Middle East is that there have not been leaders on both sides who are capable of moving their people at the same time. The trick about great leadership is telling your people something they don’t want to hear and getting them to do it. It is easy to be pushed along by the crowd to avoid court appearances or wherever your motivation is. But it’s not easy to face them and get them to do something they don’t want to do.

Now I think Israel’s Ariel Sharon would’ve been able to do it when he was Prime Minister. When Sharon was Prime Minister he had been a bit of a bete noire to the liberal Jews because he was very right wing and had stood back during a massacre of Palestinians in Shatila, which was a refugee camp in Lebanon. But Sharon had courage. That’s the thing about politics: it requires strong leaders with courage. I mean, he was prepared to tell his nation that they had to do something that they really didn’t want to do so that there would be a better long term future. And there’s not enough of that anywhere. But that’s what it takes to be a good leader.

Wright: Are their leaders elsewhere in the world who have that quality that you admire? Are there other people that you’ve seen rising in leadership positions or who are making a name for themselves that we should be watching and learning from?

Dean: My favorite was Merkel. Angela Merkel was, in my view, the leader of the free world when Trump was President. As for your second question, I think a lot of those leaders aren’t proven yet. One of the places I’m looking is Great Britain. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when power changes hands in Great Britain. Great Britain is in enormous amount of trouble as a result of their Brexit vote, which was dishonestly engineered. Keir Starmer is going to be the prime minister — for better or for worse, I don’t know him personally. But the Conservatives really screwed up Great Britain terribly, and now we’re going to see if Labour can do any better. The previous Labour leadership and Labour as a whole was a disaster. So they ended up being out of power for 14 years, and now Starmer will get a chance to turn things around. Supposedly he’s boring. I don’t care if he’s boring or if he’s thrilling. I just want him to tell the truth and be a strong leader, which means telling people what they don’t want to hear sometimes. That’s one problem about democracy. You know, people will say things that they think people want to hear. And that’s not what they need all the time. Sometimes you just have to stand up and do what’s right. And if you lose your office, you lose your office, but at least you did what you thought was important. 

But to answer your question, I’m sure there’s a long list of people who are up and coming. You guys should tell me.

Haywood: We’ve heard you’re an avid reader. Have you read anything on foreign policy lately you’d like to share?

Dean: Arne Westad wrote a really interesting book about 12^th century Korea and China, Empire and Righteous Nation, which was very interesting. Strobe Talbott, who was an undergrad at Yale when I was before ending up as Deputy Secretary of State, wrote an interesting book The Great Experiment about how nations have developed and grown together. Ned Blackhawk’s book, The Rediscovery of America, was great – really shines a light on all the hooey people learn about what Native American society was like. It really painted a comprehensive picture of what America was like before settlement by white people, which I found very interesting.

Haywood: Can you talk about how opinions and attitudes have evolved on China within U.S. politics, especially over the last few decades?

Dean: I’ve spent a lot of time in China. My first trip there was around 1999 – a business trip while I was governor. I was getting lunch with some Chinese businessmen, and after a few drinks they said some not great things about the Chinese government. And I asked them “how can you say these things about the government? Don’t you get nervous?” and one of them replied “there has been a saying in Guangzhou for many centuries: ‘the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.’” And that’s true. I think the people know a lot about the government that they don’t say.

Even earlier, my father was in charge of freight operations to supply Chiang Kai Shek during the Chinese civil war. My father had to return home to take care of his father and eventually Chiang Kai Shek was defeated. But one of the things he said was “the Chinese are never going to stay communist because they’re too entrepreneurial.” And they are. Their work ethic is unbelievable. They have made huge leaps since Mao, especially under Deng Xiaoping. I am very fond of China. And I’m not afraid of China, although I do think there are factions you have to watch out for. When I’d come back from trips to China I’d say “China’s a democracy.” Which would surprise people. But I’d tell them “all nine of the Politburo get to vote.” But the President does have to line up those votes – the three from the army, the three from the party, and the three from the bureaucracy.

I went many times with NDI to China. I used to go with other groups, too. At one point, Yale Law and Vermont Law School were co-running an NGO that sued provincial governors for violating environmental laws. We did this with the blessing of the central government there because, 20 years ago, the provincial governors had the strength to threaten the central government. Anyways, what I learned is that you can’t get a flavor of China until you spend some time there. I don’t think it’s possible. I think what people will find out is that we have a lot in common. The Chinese are so entrepreneurial. The young people especially were incredible. The first time I ever went to Beijing, I didn’t know what to expect. (Turns out it’s a big gray city with terrible architecture — go to Shanghai). But there were all these kids in blue jeans walking around hand in hand, you know, girlfriend and boyfriend. That wasn’t at all what I expected. It was indistinguishable from walking around the United States.

The problem with China’s government, and the problem with authoritarianism in general, is in the long run it’s a losing hand. I’ve met Xi before, when he was Vice President. I have respect for him. He’s a tough guy though – I would not want to meet him in the middle of the dark in the night. But his great mistake was getting rid of the term and age limits on the presidency. There are two main problems in every society: asset allocation and succession. The Chinese had solved the succession problem. If you don’t have an orderly succession, you risk blowing everything up. Many societies have blown up because there was no order of succession. And the Chinese had that. And Xi took it away. Xi is very capable, but nobody is perfect. Everybody gets old and a little demented and can’t remember things [gestures at self and laughs]. That’s the mistake they’ve made. The real danger is then when they get into a position of losing stability because of a transition in power. It’s always easier to cause a distraction elsewhere, getting a rise out of people and inspiring patriotism to detract from the chaos and inability to have an orderly succession, than it is to just have an orderly succession process. Of course, most democratic countries in the world already have that process.

[Note: The above transcript reflect the personal opinions of Dr. Dean and do not represent the views or endorsement of the Yale Review of International Studies or the Yale International Relations Association.]

This interview was conducted by Abla Abdulkadir, Owen Haywood, Lisa Tauch, and Megan Wright.