The United States' seen as a predator. China,

it's a big gorilla that people are scared of, Russia too.

History's not just about great men, it's about raw logistics.

It's about understanding geography and geology and working out how you can find

a way around that.

Peter Frankopan,

the historian making sense of a shifting world order. Do you think that Putin

and Trump have something in common in that these wars with Ukraine and

Iran respectively are with much less powerful countries,

but have they both underestimated the kind of power that those countries

can nevertheless wield?

No question.

Powerful men often miscalculate and think that their muscles and brain power are

stronger better than anybody else's.

And the challenge in a system where you have a single powerful leader who

expects everyone to bow down in front of them is that they're very hard to get

to listen to advice.

From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Mishal Husain Show.

We are at a moment right now when the US-Iran war is

again resurgent with ripple effects across the Middle East and

for global shipping and trade.

That war has already cost tens of billions of dollars.

And at precisely the same moment,

there is another longer running war,

one that is much less in the international headlines,

but which also has implications beyond the countries actually doing the

fighting, Russia and Ukraine.

I've been thinking a lot about the combined effect of these two conflicts.

And as far as the Ukraine war is concerned,

there is something very notable that has happened in the last few months.

The way Ukraine has been striking Russia has been having an impact

economically,

as well as on the battlefield where there are now tens of thousands of Russian

casualties every month.

And I think there are also links between these two situations that are worth

exploring. The tactics being deployed,

the relationship between Iran and Russia,

the comparison to moments in history.

And that is what led us to Peter Frankopan for this episode.

He is a historian,

but one who has charted the rise and fall of middle as well as great

powers, who's plugged into China and Central Asia,

and also Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East.

He's always looking for undercurrents that tell a wider story.

So transport connections, trading routes,

pipelines that reveal where new markets are being found.

Peter is professor of global history at Oxford University and the author of a

book called Silk Roads, which he updated on its 10th anniversary last year.

He's also written The Earth Transformed,

all about climate and battles over time for natural resources and land.

He is especially worth listening to if you're interested in drawing out common

threads and working out what we need to brace for next. I hope you agree.

Hi, Mishal.

Hello, Peter. How are you?

I've had a very busy year,

but you caught me in the absolute sweet spot where I've got lots of things I

ought to do, and I'd rather be talking to you than doing them.

I feel guilty though.

We're taking you away from thinking big thoughts and probably your next book.

No, I've got a manuscript I've got to hand in in a month.

So I do need to slightly get myself under the cosh, but I mean,

I don't work without a deadline. So I'm almost there.

Okay. Well, I look forward to seeing that come out.

So why don't I just start by telling you what made us reach out

to you.

It's essentially because your work has so often been about the links between

places and people, links that surprise other people.

You find these connections.

And right now we have an ongoing war in Russia and Ukraine,

which feels like it's in a new phase,

and then we have a resurgence in the war between the US and Iran.

And I just wondered, when you see those two conflicts and situations,

what jumps out to you? What are your observations at those two?

I mean, the first one is that if you decide to fight a war of choice,

it's very hard to win. If you are fighting a war of existence,

then your capacity is limitless. And in that sense,

slightly unlikely bedfellows,

you see Ukraine doing something similar to what Iran are doing,

which is you can absorb enormous amounts of military superiority,

enormous amounts of pressure, political, military, all the rest of it.

And you can keep on going, maybe not indefinitely,

but it's quite hard to deliver a knockout blow.

And Iran has been fighting since 1979,

three Cold Wars simultaneously, one with the "Great Satan",

as Iranians like to call it, the United States, one with the "Little Satan",

Israel, and with Saudi Arabia.

And it's done so for 47 years with about 3% of the US defence budget.

And I'm not here to tell you whether that's a good or a bad thing,

but if your job is to stay in business and to preserve regime stability,

then it's amazing how far you can go. So that's the kind of major takeaway that

the United States has not been able to deliver a knockout blow to middling size,

in fact small to middling size country like Iran.

And the fact that the capability to keep on going was mispriced by

Washington as it was mispriced by Moscow.

And what is your assessment then of the state of play between Russia and

Ukraine?

Because that has been the war much less than the headlines in the last few

months,

yet it feels that something distinct has happened in that Ukraine has been doing

better than many people imagined.

Well, there's no question that it's an investment,

particularly in drone technology,

but also in the hierarchy of the targets it's trying to hit from

Wildberries' logistical centers through to the oil refineries.

And that has brought the price of the war into daily Russian life.

One of the reasons it hasn't been in daily Russian life is if you have state

control of the media, you can choose what it is that your citizens hear.

When you have massive balloons of smoke over Moscow or St. Petersburg,

it suddenly becomes more real.

That capacity to invest in drone technology has taken several years and has a

lot of outside support and investment in innovation.

I think we're saying that at a time when last year Russia took less than 1% of

Ukrainian territory,

probably for the cost of something like 200,000 servicemen's lives as well as

many injured. The question I think is what it is that gets Russia to come to the

negotiating table. And that's been open to them at any point,

but there's no question that the paper cuts that Ukraine are delivering to

Russia are being very painful for the Russian economy as well as for citizens

and therefore credibility in the regime.

And is part of that because of a link to the other war in that Iran was a

major supplier of drones and other military hardware to

Russia, and then it ends up fighting a war for its own survival?

Well, we've seen all sorts of smoke and mirrors. I mean,

lots of noise in Russia. In fact, in the last month in particular,

people like Nikolai Patrushev, who's one of the grey cardinals around Putin,

very experienced,

to say that Europe wants Russia to become a resource colony and this should

never happen. If you look towards China, from Beijing's point of view,

that's exactly what Russia has become,

a resource colony where China gets metals, oil and gas at discounted prices,

and in return gives support both multilateral agencies like the UN,

institutional support,

but also lots of support that's meaningful for the Russian war effort.

So I think you could see these echoes everywhere,

but I think there's no question that Russia's challenge is to define what it is

that it wants. And so far the problem is that Putin,

it's not a particular river or a city that he wants to get to. He doesn't

believe that Ukraine should exist as a sovereign state,

despite his famous essay on the historical unity of Russia and Ukrainians where

at the very end he says it's up to Ukrainians to choose their own future.

We would never use force against Ukraine and so on.

And that I think is an existential question that if you are a Russian historian

is not new to Putin and it's not new to the last 30, 40 years.

It has a long history and legacy in Russia.

We're going to dig into a lot of what you've said, Peter,

further as we go on in this conversation.

But I'd love you to take us back in time to how your own interest in Russia in

particular, but in Iran and the Middle East as well began.

You were born, I think 1971. We're almost the same age.

I'm much older, Mishal.

Not really, but we're talking about the 1980s and teenage years.

How did the interest in Russia begin?

It began even earlier. I used to watch John Craven's Newsround.

Well-brought up child.

Yeah. As a child, it was a TV program that, I was of a generation, Mishal,

I'm sure you are the same,

where our parents actively discouraged us from watching TV because they though

it would corrupt us. But we were allowed to watch John Craven,

who did a 10-minute news bulletin at about five o'clock every day.

And I was struck even as an eight or nine-year-old boy that all the news I saw

at that time was the tail end of the Vietnam War, genocide in Cambodia,

SS-20 missiles being parked in Eastern Europe pointing at us here in the United

Kingdom.

And to see that there were all these parts of the world that we never heard

anything about in our classrooms.

So the interest in Russia or the Soviet Union as it was then was to try to

understand why it was that nuclear Holocaust was expected in our

lifetime, Mishal. And again, these last 30, 40 years,

we've come to think that the world is all about free trade or possibly even fair

trade, but to find ways in which we can cooperate together.

And I think our generation was disquieted by the fact that there

was a likely moment that the Cold War would turn hot.

So I wanted to understand that.

And so I started reading lots of Russian literature and eventually Soviet

literature too.

I was very lucky to go to a school where we had a Russian teacher and even

luckier that my Russian teacher in our A-level year had gone to,

I think,

Kuwait for 12 months and learned Arabic and came back and taught a small group

of us Arabic, but also about Middle Eastern cultures, including Iranian culture,

including the complexities in the Middle East.

So by the time I went to university,

I was already looking east. And I'm fascinated in the history of Western Europe,

but I didn't think I could add much. Whereas if I looked eastwards,

there was a whole world waiting to be explored.

And it felt to me not only interesting, but important.

And so I made a bet on that when I started my PhD on looking at those worlds,

that by and large people though I was mad because if you wanted to have an

academic job,

it was much better to do the Tudors or Hitler because that's what students want.

And the worlds I work on are still slightly obscure. For investment bankers,

they'll call all of these places the rest of the world. I mean,

China now has its own category,

but our engagement with peoples who live to our east is pretty minimal.

And even now, despite Gaza being in the news, despite the war in Iran,

despite the importance of critical minerals, despite last year in April,

there being a war between India and Pakistan,

despite this huge change across Southeast Asia in the last 20 or 30 years,

apart from organizations like yours at Bloomberg,

we still understand these parts of the world, not just imperfectly,

we pay them very little attention. And it turns out that they are super

important to our own futures.

I'm going to share two things.

One that is different in the way we were brought up and one that we have in

common, because I grew up in the Middle East, we didn't have television,

so I had no-.

Okay, no John Craven.

No news, no TV news or children's programming of any kind.

Although I do remember my parents talking about Cambodia and exactly the period

you mentioned. But I also learned Russian at school,

and that was also due to the geopolitical time because at that time,

the Soviets were in Afghanistan.

My family in Pakistan wondered if one day they would come across the border and

they thought it would be a good idea if someone in the family knew how to speak

Russian. So I do recognize the time you're talking about. And of course,

then there was that period after the end of the Cold War and before 9/11 where

it felt like you could travel anywhere, you could do anything,

and then the world started to look a lot darker.

Yeah. I mean, the old saying is if you're an optimist, learn English,

if you're a pessimist, learn Chinese, and if you're a realist,

learn how to assemble a Kalashnikov. I mean,

that Afghan war and its conclusion followed by the dissolution of the Soviet

Union, the fall of the Berlin War at the end of the '80s,

and then 91 when Soviet Union collapsed,

it did press such a huge set of changes.

And those changes sometimes we think of as being in the Soviet world,

but they had a massive impact on the global economy too.

But look at Russia, which changed fundamentally in economic terms,

but there's a mindset that remained. And I'm thinking particularly about Putin,

former KGB man.

One form of control that he knew was essentially replaced by another form of

control.

Well, it's small groups of men who make all the decisions. And in fact,

that world of the 80s that you missed out, Mishal,

because you weren't allowed to watch TV.

But we used to have Soviet leaders who they'd be dead for a few days,

for a few weeks, like Chernenko, before it was announced in the world,

they all looked like they lived in a deep freeze.

And the group around Putin are all in their 70s now.

They've all grown up together.

There's no sign of a new generation coming forward to replace them.

And I think that in some ways that the decision-making in Moscow has been as

narrowly dictated under Putin as it was under the Soviet Union.

So there's a lot of continuity there. I mean,

you could argue that parking vast amounts of assets into the hands of about 30

families changes things, but I could promise you under Marxist-Leninist states,

there are still forms of control that families are very adept at keeping within

their own structure. So I think one of the challenges is we thought that Russia

was changing. We though that Russia was going to become more like us.

Now with a bit more gas in the tank of thinking about where did this all come

from? Russia has had the same foreign minister for 20 years.

Putin's essentially been in charge for more than a quarter of a century.

The group around him likewise. So I think like in any relationship,

either Russia's changed or in fact Russia had never changed,

it's just we misunderstood it and got it wrong.

So I think that that would be my more persuasive line of trying to argue,

which is that the end of the Soviet Union was seen as a moment to regroup and to

re-harness what Russia would look like as a great power. And Russia,

despite its military weakness,

the fact it's a smaller economy than Italy has a small population that's

declining ,life expectancies, all those metrics,

it still has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and it has the hydrocarbons and

the metals that mean that it shapes global markets. So Russia gets a seat at the

high table, whether it deserves it or not,

and Russia tries to leverage that weakness into a stronger position than it

might otherwise have.

So Peter, can I then take you into the future and ask you about how

various situations in different parts of the world,

problems or conflicts are likely to play out in

your view? The first being Ukraine and Russia.

The backdrop we've already discussed,

do you see a landing zone for an agreement at any point or

are we looking at almost endless, perhaps low lying conflict?

Well, I should probably,

with the modesty of a historian say I'm much better looking backwards than

forwards because I've got facts and data in front of me and shaking the bones to

guess what happens, there's a slight hiding to nothing.

I'd have thought that the logic would be that there would be a frozen conflict

in Ukraine,

that eventually one or both sides reach the stage of exhaustion where there's a

sort of fudge.

And that those fudges can last essentially indefinitely as they have done

between North and South Korea, as they've done in Cyprus since 1974.

Kashmir, you could say.

Kashmir too. And you can establish a modus vivendi.

There are ways in which faces can be saved.

It doesn't look to me that those are the noises that are coming from Moscow of a

willingness to say, let's cut our losses. Trump last summer offered Putin,

I think,

a deal that he thought was impossible to turn down of bringing Russia back into

the G8 family of nations, back into the global economy,

US investment into metals in particular,

and gas and oil fields in the north of Russia as well as elsewhere.

The technical expertise that's needed because sanctions, you can beat them,

but they're expensive to beat. And he couldn't understand, I think,

why Putin said no.

And Putin did say no because he started to give a long lecture about this is

Russian history that goes back a thousand years of confrontation from the West.

So although the logic would be a settlement of some kind,

that requires one or both sides to reach a stage of exhaustion. And I can't see

that yet.

So I fear that things will keep going until Putin or

Moscow decides that it's time to cut losses.

And there has been some noise about that properly for the last month or two.

That might escalate over the summer.

Yeah. Well,

that's what I wanted to dig into because you wrote about this in your foreign

policy piece recently that average monthly casualties are running at more than

30,000. This is on the Russian side. And that Russian fighters,

once they're sent out onto the battlefield,

survive an average of 20 to 35 minutes. I mean,

this is almost incomprehensible to me, those kinds of odds.

Those battlefield numbers,

they're drawn from a small number of Russian military bloggers.

But interestingly, this week,

the head of CIA has said that this is confirmed by US military intelligence too.

I think the point is that the casualty levels are unsustainable.

Russia is losing more on the battlefield than they are able to recruit.

And so far,

the men who've been called into service have been from distant regions for the

big cities and from minorities disproportionately.

There are lots of minority populations in Russia.

The problem now is for Russia to keep sustaining itself and to sustain its army,

it needs to be starting to look at how it conscripts from cities.

And that brings, again, the war closer to home. And again,

you'll remember from the Afghan war, Mishal,

that one of the reasons why it became difficult with the Soviet Union was

mothers of fallen servicemen started to take to the streets to protest that

their boys would never come home again except in body bags. And that is

something that is always difficult in any authoritarian state,

whether you control the media or not, is that groups of people start to say,

"We are willing to take up protests because we've got nothing left to lose." But

that is something I think that could happen both in Russia and also in Iran.

And I'd probably have both of those on my bingo card for coming up later this

year. Then the question is in all periods of history with the persecution of

Christians through to how this worked in Islamic societies is you either have to

become more tolerant and you need to let some pressure into the system or you

have to repress and you have to crack down.

And cracking down tends to be an attractive short-term solution,

but it can make things much, much worse.

Yeah. I mean, I'm still wondering at its heart,

what does the Ukraine project, the Ukraine war represent to Putin?

Or is it a combination of all of these? Is it an imperial project?

Is it recovery of lost prestige? Is it emotional?

Or is it a question of his own survival?

Because if he has to make a deal or end the war in Ukraine,

what does that mean for his standing domestically?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's lots of things.

I think there's no question that many of us think that Putin having an

existential threat or some of his badge as an existential threat is important

because it justifies the means. It's a really important tool of control.

I think beyond that, what does Putin want?

I think is to be able to frame this in a context that this is not just about

Zelenskyy or Kyiv. It's about a persistent,

long-running way in which Europe in particular is trying to undermine Russia

and to colonize it.

And we might find that impossible to understand because the way we see it,

we're trying to help Ukraine protect its sovereign territory.

But that is something that has gone through the system in Russia and is

absolutely believed that this was all to do with a plan that the West always had

to destabilize Russia, that Russia is a persona non grata, never will be,

and no matter what Russia does. And so the war is a way of saying this is our

way of showing how we will bloody Europe's noses.

But it's something that's deeply believed in Russia that Europe and particularly

the British are behind all of these things. And again,

the very similar conclusions are drawn in Tehran too.

Do you think that Putin and Trump have something in common in that these

wars with Ukraine and Iran respectively are with much less powerful countries,

but have they both underestimated the kind of power that those

countries can nevertheless wield?

No question.

And I think that powerful men often miscalculate and think that their muscles

and brain power are stronger better than anybody else's.

And the challenge in a system where you have a single powerful leader who

expects everyone to bow down in front of them is that they're very hard to get

to listen to advice. And so we see Putin micromanaging the war.

We see Trump opening the Strait of Hormuz,

threatening to charge tariffs on passage on volumes of cargo,

and then 24 hours changing their mind. Both of them blow in the wind.

And to some extent,

Trump and Putin suffer from the lack of discipline in sticking and

staying on target,

not defining what their goal is and not then thinking about how do you problem

solve. And that's probably not a great position to be in. And arguably,

if you are to ask a jobbing historian like me,

that was why countries chose to have parliaments and democracies. It wasn't

about rights and freedoms. It wasn't just about rights and freedoms.

It was about taking those powers away from kings,

taking powers away from single rulers who might mismanage things.

And it wasn't about the belief in the brains of crowds or the sanity of crowds.

It was that wars are very risky. And in Britain, for example,

the selection process from the 1700s onwards about which wars to get involved

with tended to be quite cynical and they tended to be very,

very carefully based on where were we likely to win?

That's not the way that Putin thinks about things,

not the way that Trump thinks about things. Interestingly,

Xi Jinping and Beijing has been watching this very carefully and I think has

been repricing what this means for Chinese military architecture,

not just with Taiwan, but with other arenas too.

Well,

that's exactly what I wanted to ask you about next because China has those deep

links with both Russia and Iran.

It has bought or is still buying oil from those two countries.

There are other links as well.

So you are saying it's benefited because it is seen the exercise of

US military power and it's learning from it. But overall,

how has it been impacted? Because economically,

the loss of those imports of oil from Iran must be significant.

Well, Javier Blas,

one of your excellent correspondents at Bloomberg has been flagging over the

last couple of months,

China's imported about 45% less oil than it normally does.

And to understand why that's the case begs lots of different questions and

difficult questions.

Number one might be that China's economy is overheating and the demand has

fallen, which I don't think looks likely to me,

even though there's obviously pressure on China's economy.

The second is that China's oil reserves are much,

much bigger than anybody had realized.

Or there's another way in which China's getting oil that we are not able to see

through.

So I think that there is a real question about how that piece of the Hormuz

closure has affected China. And in fact, all of Asia,

84% of the oil and gas that comes through Hormuz doesn't end up in Europe or

Africa or the United States. It ends up in Asia.

So Asian economies are at the thick end of this. And I mean,

from the point of view of how this is being analysed,

obviously one of the best things you can do if you're a military strategist is

to see how weapons perform on the battlefield.

And when you have intense conflict like we've seen since 28th of February,

you can benchmark what pieces of kit perform well and how.

That happened a lot in the India-Pakistan confrontation.

It wasn't very long last April,

but when you can see how anti-air missiles perform,

how you can see how radar detection works,

you get real-time experiments that are not being done in a laboratory or in

theory. So China's harvested a lot of logistical information.

But I think there's also the question about leadership decisions on the

battlefield.

And to see that the big player that should outnumber and outfight the smaller

doesn't happen easily,

I think requires a lot of thinking. And there's a lot of thinking going on in

Beijing around exactly that now, the mispricing, the fact of war.

So how would it use that knowledge of the US?

Could you imagine China making a move on Taiwan knowing

not only how the US has used military power lately,

but also knowing that this war has cost a lot of money already?

Pete Hegseth has put it at more than $37 billion the last few months and

is short of munitions and missiles.

Well, Taiwan is a different geography. First of all,

our islands have great levels of resilience,

but they also have extreme vulnerabilities.

So there are all sorts of ways in which China can

make life very, very difficult in Taiwan. Taiwan, again,

imports more than 95% of its fuel and about the same proportion of its water.

So finding a way to strangle Taiwan or to make things difficult,

all you need is one shipment of bananas that has an unusual spider or a pathogen

on it. And you say, look,

we're going to do inspections that are going to take several weeks and we don't

have enough people to monitor and to investigate this and it's nothing personal.

Suddenly life can become difficult.

So there are ways in which if you want to put pressure on somebody's windpipe,

there are aggressive ways of doing it. And then there are slower,

softer ways. I'd have thought the law of numbers in Taiwan looks to me

more complicated if China doesn't want to force the issue,

despite the fact many people think that Xi is determined to do this and be ready

to do this by 2027.

There are lots of anniversaries coming up about the founding of the Communist

Party, anniversaries of Mao taking over mainland China.

There are all sorts of ways in which pressure can be imposed. And again,

because of the war in Iran,

we forget that Scott Bessent in Davos in January had said that the single

greatest threat to the global economy,

the single greatest choke point was on the semiconductor industry of Taiwan.

There are all sorts of ways in which you can make that difficult too and

compromise.

So I think that a lot depends on what kind of game it is that China wants.

Well, you could also say that China, the status quo is not a bad one.

There is an economic relationship that exists and perhaps that's not such a bad

status quo.

Yeah.

And Taiwan spends less on its defence than Trump's demanding us to spend in

Europe. Taiwan typically around 2% of its GDP on defence.

So I think a lot will depend. I mean,

what's interesting is if you travel around China and Taiwan and you talk to

anybody under the age 35, they really don't care about these kinds of things.

So I think in the case of Taiwan,

the vulnerability of the strait as a choke point is what is really important

both to China where so much of China's important exports come through that

strait, but also to places like South Korea and Japan.

About a quarter of UAE's exports and imports come through the strait of Taiwan.

So these choke points are a reminder that history's not just about great men,

although it might look like that at the moment. It's about raw logistics.

It's about understanding geography and geology and working out how you can find

a way around that. So one of the reasons why CPEC,

the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is such an important part for China is it

provides optionality to be able to send things through to places like Gwadar

in due course on the south coast of Pakistan.

Not particularly well utilized at the moment,

but it could be in the right or the wrong circumstances.

And I think having those options is what forward strategy looks like.

Gwader is that big port that the Chinese have built on the south coast of

Pakistan. It's interesting you mentioned the UAE, Peter,

because I was looking at this sign of new cordiality and

rapprochement between the UAE and Saudi Arabia because those two countries,

again,

this is probably past most people by because of the international climate we

live in,

but they've had their differences before the Iran war and through the Iran war.

And I wonder what you make of relationships within the Gulf at this moment in

time.

Well,

I'd have thought the first one is that necessity is the mother of all invention.

And with Iran not just sitting as a threat,

but positioning itself and thinking of itself now as a hegemon,

thinks it survived the worst that United States can throw,

thinks that it's got proper ability to close and put pressure on the global

economy.

That means that lots of other voices are not necessarily in Iran's camp,

but need to have some kind of settlement.

Suddenly those differences of opinion between UAE and Saudi, Qatar,

Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and others suddenly looks that, well,

how do we find a regional solution where we're all going to be part of this

together? We talk a lot about China,

its investment in port infrastructure and loans and so on,

but other players are doing something similar.

Saudi Arabia and its investment in the economy of countries like Morocco,

you could see that this is a kind of Mark Carney world of middle powers trying

to work out how they can all negotiate together at a time where you see a lot of

big predators out in the wilderness. The United States seen as a predator in

large parts of Asia. China,

it's a big gorilla that people are scared of as well as seeing their

opportunities. Russia too. Iran probably on the edge of that category as well.

And I think that those moving parts mean that there can be a time of

consolidation and people putting their differences to one side.

Well, let's draw all of this together, Peter, before you leave us,

because it's a year since you wrote just after the 12-day

war between the US and Israel and Iran,

you wrote at that time that the past few weeks have brought reminders of how a

new world order is straining to be born. One year on,

how do you see things?

Is there a decline in US power that we're seeing play out

and what ultimately replaces it?

I don't think there's a decline.

I'd have though that you could take the opposite view, which is the US,

despite the chaos of what's happened,

has shown that it is willing to go in and put its money where its mouth is,

even in places where it said it wouldn't.

The US has held its share of the global economy for the last 50 years

and in terms of its innovation, its military, its cultural impact,

I think it's wrong to price the US as being a declining power.

But having said that,

there's no question that Trump has talked a lot about BRICs,

Marco Rubio has talked a lot about the global world order does not have the

institutions required for the world of today and tomorrow,

and that the global order is holding the United States back.

But lots of these states that I work on are talking quite heavily about could

you have metals exchanges? Could you have crops exchanges?

Where you have lots of these states that are producing rice, wheat, and so on,

and to do price fixing and make rich economies like the West,

pay for them at inflated prices.

So that sits alongside some of the new tech where most of the Chinese models are

open source, most of the stuff in the West trying to monetize.

Those are two very, very different trajectories. So that new world order,

I think I was right that there was the strain of what that might look like.

But these states don't have huge amounts in common,

but you can work together if you want to and it suits you.

You are a scholar of the past, but contrary to what you said earlier,

you have talked plenty about the future.

So I'd love to just ask you to look even further ahead as we close to

2036.

What is something underappreciated today that will be all around

us and so obvious 10 years from now?

I think the first thing is the impact of the El Niño system coming towards us in

the next 12 to 18 months.

I think that the sea surface temperatures that we're seeing in the Pacific and

the Atlantic are not just abnormal,

they are on a magnitude of scale beyond anything we've seen before.

That will do things in terms of heat waves, wildfires, droughts,

crop impacts that I think really deserve to be thought about.

And that's going to create much high levels of inequality of countries that are

energy poor and food poor are going to have a tough time coming ahead.

That was going to pose questions also about the global environmental and

humanitarian order. When you and I, Mishal, ending up where we started, grew up,

the UN had a fundamental role in humanitarian relief and disaster relief.

That's receded a huge way.

So one of the questions would be when we see the next 12 and 18 months coming,

what happens in stressed countries?

Well, it'll be plenty of material for your future books.

You've written one about the earth being transformed and climate and the battle

for natural resources.

What do you think you will be writing about in 10 years time?

You'll be charting all of this and more?

I'm hoping I'll have hung up my pen and I'll be sitting on a beach somewhere

reading clever things that other people have written rather than having to make

my own mind run overtime. When you see the problems around energy,

around food, around new global orders, I think it's an odd thing to say,

but they do focus the mind. They do make you think about long-term strategy.

They do make you think about what it is that you need as a sovereign state to

protect yourself and also how things go looking forward.

So I think if some of those questions can get answered, I'll have a nice,

easy retirement watching the news and seeing what's going on.

But I've got quite a bit to do before then, I think.

Peter Frankopan, thank you so much.

Thanks for taking us around the world back in time and into the future.

Thanks so much for having me, Mishal.

And that's where we left it.

There is no excuse now for Peter not to get back to that manuscript.

And please do have a look at my written notes at bloomberg.com/mishal.

They are always there as another dimension to these episodes,

and you'll find links to the data behind what Peter and I discussed,

details of his books,

and a sense of what the team and I dug into before and after the

recording. Do have a look and I'll see you here next time.