Henry Farrell: belief

Transcript context

…The second big story from today is from the world of basketball. As you probably know, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweets in favor of the Hong Kong protests. It seems both the Rockets and the NBA forced him to delete the tweet and basically retract the statement. Who is in the wrong here? Daryl Morey, the Rockets, the NBA, China, everyone? What do you think? Again, looking at this from my political science hat, this kind of stuff has been happening for a long, long time, but not so much to the United States. There’s a book by Blackwill and Harris, which came out with the Council on Foreign Relations a couple of years ago, which looks at how China has been imposing this kind of pressure against a variety of smaller countries, especially with respect to the Dalai Lama. And when China says jump, companies do tend to jump. And of course, we’ve seen Hollywood for the last number of years has been quite sensitive to the Chinese market, most recently as exemplified by the decision to remove, I think it was the Taiwanese flag from the remake of Top Gun from the back of Tom Cruise’s jacket because this was perceived as being possibly provocative. So this is pretty standard stuff, and this tells us something about the way that businesses operate. You can see the way that businesses operate globally as having both great benefits and great weaknesses. If one wants to think about the standard story about how interdependence, at least under some circumstances, creates peace because businesses have an incentive to try and create peaceful and happy relations between nations in order to secure their commerce, I think that there’s something to it, although as my work with Abe on weaponized interdependence suggests, there also are some clear limits to that as well. But the obverse of this is that business is obviously in the business of making profits, and when there are clear political risks associated to business doing certain kinds of things, by and large, businesses are not going to be especially courageous. And this is particularly likely to be true of big firms, which I think are more likely to come under this kind of pressure. One saw this already with regards to Hong Kong. There have been that airways chief executive who effectively got ousted. I’m trying to remember the company, but I can’t. I think that this is, in a sense, if you want to outsource a lot of our decision-making about culture, about the ways that things ought to be done to business, this is what you’re going to expect, for better or for worse. In a world of increasing weaponized interdependence, exactly to where does the power shift? Is it to the big nations, to the nasty nations, to the nations willing to move first? Nations or unions? What’s your general take on who is gaining in status and influence?…

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