The Honorable Tony Blair, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; Executive Chairman, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change In conversation with: Alan Murray, FORTUNE
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00:00 for decades our final guest of the 2023 Global Forum has had a high-level up-close view of the
00:07 intricate interplay between geopolitics, economic shifts, and the transformative power of technology
00:13 and how all of these things have the potential to create profound changes for your businesses,
00:19 for governments, and society as a whole as we've been talking about for the last three days. He is
00:24 the Honorable Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Executive Chairman of the Tony
00:29 Blair Institute for Global Change. He holds the view as many of us do that the world is at
00:36 a critical inflection point and that technology has the power to bring enormous change on many
00:42 fronts from helping the climate crisis to raising living standards and importantly acting as a
00:48 disruptor in business. Sir Tony joins us today to share his thoughts on our world as it reshapes,
00:54 realigns, and enters this new era of business that we've been talking about for the last three days.
01:00 I need to make one request before we get started. Please turn off, put away your electronic devices.
01:08 There will be no recording, no personal photography during permitted during this
01:14 session so I need you to honor that please and please welcome Sir Tony to the stage of the
01:19 Fortune Global Forum. Thank you so much for being here with us to close out this event.
01:33 We've got a complicated world to talk about and a limited amount of time to talk about it in
01:40 but I'd like to start with the Middle East because I know it's an area you know well.
01:47 What what hope can you give us that what's happening in Israel and Gaza will come to a
01:54 conclusion soon? Well first of all Alan it's a great pleasure to be here with you in the wonderful
02:00 city of Abu Dhabi in the extraordinary Emirates Palace Hotel where if you've ever stayed here
02:06 and want to go to the gym by the time you find it you've more or less done your work. You don't need
02:10 to yeah. Yeah look I was just saying to you before we came on stage since leaving office I've
02:19 probably made over 250 visits to Israel and to other countries in the region.
02:26 So I've studied this issue a lot and and I could talk to you for a very long time about it but I
02:36 in order to summarise where I think the the only hope lies it's at the conclusion of this we have to
02:44 return to some sort of path for a lasting peace
02:48 and that has got to be based on two things. The the Israelis have got to have security
02:57 and the Palestinians have got to have hope and the two things are absolutely linked
03:03 because without security you'll never get a successful negotiation and without hope there's
03:08 no real incentive for the Palestinians to engage in that process either. So it's a it's it's immensely
03:15 difficult but I still believe the return to what we call the two-state solution even though it looks
03:21 very far away and very distant at the moment is the only ultimate and and long-term solution to
03:26 the problem and really what's happened over the the the past weeks is that we've recognised that
03:34 this is a problem that has to be solved not managed. Now I've taken that view for a very
03:39 long time and have gone around the the the region because I have an office in Israel, I've won here,
03:46 I've a lot of presence in in the region and I've always said this is a problem where even if you
03:53 think you can take it out of your in tray and put it in the bottom drawer it's going to find its way
03:59 out the bottom drawer and back into your in tray and I think it's going to require a lot of
04:04 creativity and a lot of imagination but. Is there any chance that the current ceasefire can lead to
04:12 negotiations towards that kind of a solution or are we still a long way from that? I think we're
04:19 a we're a long way because the essentials that gave rise to this situation haven't haven't changed
04:24 but but you know as I say I think the most important thing is that this causes and rightly
04:33 there's a huge focus on what is happening now but we have also got to be thinking now about what
04:39 happens after. Where it goes yeah. One last question on this there have been stories in the
04:43 press that suggest you may be invited in to help address these issues perhaps on the humanitarian
04:49 side would you be willing to do something like that? Well I'm I already am involved but you know
04:54 on the humanitarian side you've got the UN in in charge of that and I wouldn't want to to cut
05:00 across that but you know by by reason of the experience I've got of the issue in the time
05:07 I've spent on it I'll do anything I can to help. Yeah well we thank you for that. Of course there
05:13 there are two wars going on in the world we still have the the mess in Ukraine. I know you've
05:19 thought about that and spent some time on that. What hope is there there to get out of it soon?
05:27 I mean it's a bit depressing at the moment going around the world in all these different spots
05:36 because I have to say right now that looks extremely tough because from the Ukrainian
05:46 perspective you know they've been subject to an aggressive intervention as a democratic country
05:55 attempt to remove their president replace a democratically elected president in a country
06:00 that's never been a problem for anyone in in their region. I mean they you know anyone who knows
06:06 Ukraine and I do know because my institute's actually had projects there over the years
06:10 you know could have could have said they they're going to fight very hard for their independence.
06:15 I I've always taken the view that we should do everything that we can to support Ukraine but
06:22 do so in order to enable a negotiation ultimately to conclude the conflict and the key thing for
06:29 the Ukrainians will be that it concludes in a way that means that this aggression is never repeated
06:35 and that's going to be the the core outcome but if you think of the loss of life you know Russia's
06:41 maybe lost over 150,000 troops. I mean it's it's staggering this is literally happening on the edge
06:48 of Europe and the Ukrainians also suffered an immense amount of casualties civilian and and
06:54 military. I think for Ukraine as well the the essential thing they've got a path to European
07:00 Union membership. I think they will want some form of security guarantee NATO membership or at least
07:07 a path to it. I hope it can be resolved. It will have to be resolved ultimately by a negotiation
07:15 but I think that although I thought there might be an opportunity to do that towards the end of this
07:21 year at the moment I think it's it's quite hard to foresee. So again we're we're still a long way
07:27 away from resolution. We're stuck but again if you if you take a step back and you look at the
07:33 the big picture of the conflict there I think you can see a design as to how it could be
07:40 it could be settled. But as I say the absolute essence for the Ukrainians is that they know that
07:48 for the future they've got security. I appreciate you doing this tour of the world with us because
07:53 this is a group of business leaders and our polling at Fortune shows that today when you ask
07:58 you know what challenges are top of mind for you to the Fortune 500 CEOs, geopolitics comes up at
08:05 the very top and I don't know that that's been true since the end of the the Cold War. So but
08:11 but even more you what war in Europe, war in the Middle East, but even more than that the issue
08:18 that business leaders are most concerned about is the tensions in Asia and the competition between
08:24 the U.S. and China because that one has the greatest potential to affect their business.
08:29 How do you view what's happening there? So I think you've you've got to distinguish between two
08:36 separate things. The first is that in my view China has every right to be acknowledged as a
08:43 as a world power. I mean by dint of their civilization, their population, their economy,
08:49 their technology and their culture. The difficulty is that over these past years
08:57 China has evolved in a direction that has become much more externally let's say assertive,
09:05 some would even say aggressive, and internally has has gone back to thinking the Communist Party's
09:10 got to be in you know renewed as as the the sole source of political power. So I think as a as a
09:20 country rises in power it's always going to cause tension with a country like America that is the
09:27 most powerful country in the world. So that was always going to happen but when you then put in
09:32 in addition to that the change within China I think that is that is what is really accelerated
09:41 and the level of tension. Now I think there was a... Just to be to be absolutely clear when you
09:47 talk about the change within China you're talking about the change towards more government control.
09:52 Yeah yeah absolutely. So you know in in my day we had the view that as China evolved economically
10:00 it would evolve politically and it would evolve politically more or less in the direction...
10:04 More like us. That we would want it. It's not what's happened. Though it's very important the
10:08 one thing I've learned since leaving office is how little we really know about Chinese politics.
10:16 I mean I think I think I mean I talked to a whole range of people about it and I come away thinking
10:23 I've got more questions than answers. And so you know how China is today is not necessarily how
10:29 China will be in 10 or 20 years time. I think you know I have two principles in in dealing with this.
10:37 Number one the West should be strong enough to deal with whatever comes out of China.
10:42 So I think it's important that we have military and technological capability that means we're
10:48 strong enough to deal with anything that comes. But secondly unlike some other Western politicians
10:55 I believe it's important to stay engaged with China. And it's important to recognize that
11:00 there are areas where we we need China. We need its cooperation. I mean we'll talk about COP in
11:06 a minute. We need China for climate change. We need it in respect of global health. I think China
11:12 in diplomatic terms is much more has got a much more meaningful presence today. We will probably
11:19 need China when it comes to solving the Ukraine conflict and maybe in the Middle East as well
11:25 where China has played a role in in recent times. So I so I think strong enough to deal with whatever
11:31 comes but stay engaged and you know have a keep those lines of communication and dialogue open
11:38 which is why I think it was important at the recent summit between President Biden and President Xi
11:44 Xiping that they agreed certain guardrails around the military interaction. Really important to do
11:52 that. And also the West has just got to recognize you know countries around the world today. We
12:00 work in roughly 35 or 40 different countries and you can't force them to choose today. They're not
12:08 going to choose. If you say to if you say to you know countries that are in the developing world
12:13 today right. We want you to be with America and not with China. They're going to they're not going
12:18 to do it. They're going to say we China is and this is the big difference is why I think analogies
12:23 with the Soviet Union are completely wrong. China is the largest trading partner of actually most
12:30 countries in the world other than their nearest neighbor. Well interesting. We had that conversation
12:35 this morning on this stage because there have been reports that the US is asking large investors
12:41 sovereign wealth funds in this region to say you can you can invest in technology here or you can
12:48 invest in technology in China but you can't do both because we don't trust the interchange. You
12:54 will have certain areas particularly those that touch on sensitive security in which in which
12:58 that there will be a pretty binary choice but there's a lot of other things. I mean you've still
13:02 got how many hundreds of billions of dollars of trade the US and China. So I think it's it's a
13:08 this this needs again it needs you've got to face a situation today where I think it's really
13:18 important to understand the way the world is going. America has actually re-emerged in the past two
13:26 years by the way as easily the strongest country in the world. I mean it's politics it's another
13:32 matter. We'll get to that. Yeah we get that but actually if you if you think in terms of economic
13:37 resilience, technology, resources, it's it's easily the most powerful country right but when you get
13:44 to the middle of this century and this is why I always tell my my my children not that they ever
13:49 listen to me of course but I say to them you know by the time this is why it's so important that you
13:54 remain open-minded to the world. By the middle of this century I think you'll have three
13:58 superpowers. You'll have America, China and probably India. I mean that's not certain but I think I
14:05 think they'll get there and then you're going to have the tall countries which are the ones with
14:10 populations maybe 200 million and so on. You have Brazil, Indonesia and so on but they're not going
14:14 to be they're not going to be the same as the giants and then you're going to have the medium
14:20 sized people that's like Britain, Germany, Italy, France and all the rest of it. Okay so in today's
14:25 world. Get Abu Dhabi in there. Well Abu Dhabi is is um Abu Dhabi is one of those countries that
14:31 because and frankly I think because of its leadership is whatever the size of its population
14:37 is going to play an outsized role but the point the point I'm really making is this.
14:42 In that world people are going to come together in order to have collectively what they can't
14:50 have individually. That's the reason why the European Union when people go on and occasionally
14:54 they do in Britain about you know European Union's a failing project and so on. What will hold the
14:59 European Union together and expand it in time is the fact that unless you have that collective power
15:06 these giants look giants sit on people. It's what giants do and so unless you're able together to be
15:13 big enough and go and sit at the same table you know you're going to have a problem and so you'll
15:18 find regional groupings become much more powerful and you'll find countries want to have yes you
15:25 know the Britain is always going to be very close to the United States of America but we'll want that
15:29 relationship with India. We'll want we'll want a relationship with China and that's the way the
15:34 world's going to be today. Fascinating but to get from here to there requires as you said leadership
15:40 uh and and frankly it sometimes seems when you're looking at the political world that leadership is
15:46 in somewhat short supply. Yeah I mean you know you've always got to be careful when you leave
15:52 office to to think I was all great good old days it often wasn't and also by the way one thing I've
15:59 learned since leaving office is that it's a lot easier to give the advice than do the job but
16:04 um I think so I I have this this this uh
16:11 fire alarm. It was not not you. I think there's maybe some dramatic announcement. Carry on. Right
16:21 okay um you know I've come to have this view that the the problem with politics is basically
16:29 politics uh and what I mean by that is that you know again what I have always said to my kids is
16:37 you know work hard play hard is a is a good maxim right but play hard work hard that doesn't work
16:46 there's a there's no you're gonna you're gonna trip up in life and in politics policy should
16:53 come first and politics should come second and what I mean by that is the first thing you do
16:58 is search for the right answer and then you shape the politics around it and the problem with western
17:04 politics in these last years is people have started with the politics and then reach for the policy
17:10 that matches the politics and that's why you end up in a situation where people don't think long
17:16 term where they don't think strategically where they're trying to follow particularly now with
17:20 social media they get buffeted by social media and it's it's you know leadership is all about
17:28 taking a clear position based on the reality of the situation and sticking to it and I think that
17:34 staying power that sticking is pretty and how do we get back I mean you're talking about a much more
17:42 pragmatic problem-solving form of leadership. I think we get well we get back to it by people
17:52 realizing one that in fact the public in the end I think sensible politics is basically a supply
17:58 problem not a demand problem but it's very easy if you're following social media to think it's
18:06 you know that's what everyone thinks and I sometimes have leaders say to me well I've got
18:10 this big social media campaign and there's a hundred thousand people have you know said they
18:16 like this or that and the next thing and I say yeah but is that a hundred thousand does that
18:19 represent one million ten million or does it represent one hundred thousand because if it does
18:23 you know you shouldn't follow it and you know one of the things one of the first lessons of
18:30 leadership and any of you here leading organizations will know this is that those that shout loudest
18:35 don't deserve to be heard most right but actually that's what social media does it's a loud noise
18:42 and you've got to so the first thing you've got to do is just understand that and be you know big
18:48 enough and strong enough to overcome it. The second thing though is you need a mission you know
18:53 I come to the conclusion that politics you know being a leader of a government leader of a company
19:03 leader of the local community football team is it's all the same thing in the sense that
19:07 the qualities of leadership are quite similar and you need a plan right and western politics
19:15 at the moment it's it's a lot of it is just noise without clarity as to what we're trying to do.
19:24 Now my view and I know we're about to talk about this in a minute is the central thing that's
19:28 happening in the world today is the technology revolution. Yeah yeah let's let's go there. Yeah
19:32 but that is the biggest real world event but here's the fascinating thing I got my institute
19:36 to do a paper and analyze in the 19th century industrial revolution and how long it took
19:41 politics to catch up with reality and the answer was decades and today you've got the same thing.
19:47 I go and have conversations with political leaders and I said to them they're saying I think
19:51 you've really got to get your head around this and what it's going to do and how it's going to
19:55 change the world and we have a conversation they say yeah it's really interesting now let's talk
19:59 about politics going to a lot of political and I said no that this is if that is the big real world
20:05 event you've got to have a plan to understand this technology to master it and harness it
20:11 and once you have a plan it's a lot easier to break through the noise because then you know
20:18 where you're going. We've been talking about that a lot for the last couple of days obviously every
20:22 business represented in this room also needs a plan. You did do the report on the topic focused
20:29 mostly on public policy I think. What does public policy need to do to make sure this technology
20:37 develops in the right way? Well so there are two separate things there are a whole lot of risks
20:42 obviously around artificial intelligence because it's a general purpose technology so you can use
20:46 it for good or you can use it for bad but leave that I mean there's a lot of work being done on
20:51 that and it's very important work but I think what is important for government is to focus on
20:58 the opportunities of it. I mean we should be able to revolutionize our health care system switch them
21:04 from curing disease to preventing it. We should be able to educate our children in a personalized way
21:10 there are every single bit of the government system should be changed and made much more
21:17 efficient through the use of artificial intelligence. In other words when you think
21:22 about it there's a massive job to do with government working and working in partnership
21:28 with the private sector and the difficulty you have is that in government there isn't the skill
21:35 set to handle this so if I was back in power today I would be bringing a whole lot of different people
21:40 into government and you know I would be literally looking at every single thing that government is
21:48 doing and measuring it up against the revolution that's happening and it does offer you the
21:54 possibility of more efficient public services at lower cost with a better connection with the
22:01 citizen. So I think it's massively important but I don't yet notice governments really grappling
22:10 with it in the way they need to. Well we had on stage here earlier I was going to say we had the
22:15 the UAE minister of artificial intelligence who may be alone in the world as a minister of
22:20 artificial. Yeah well I think people are catching up but one of the advantages here is there's just
22:25 a lot of long-term thinking that could be done. Yeah so many of the people in this room are going
22:30 from here to the COP conference you're going to the COP conference talk a little bit about climate.
22:35 Do you feel like we're making the progress we need to make to solve the the planetary problem?
22:41 Well I think you'd have to say no. You know we've come on a huge wave from 10 or 20 years ago that's
22:50 for sure but I think it's important to define what the problem is. I mean essentially I think
23:00 you often get the justice argument mixed up with the climate argument. Now it's true the western
23:07 world has created this problem but by 2030 the combined emissions of the United States and Europe
23:13 will be just under 20 percent. The emissions of India, China and the rest of Southeast Asia will be
23:20 65 to 70 percent. So and you know in the developing world I mean we have projects in Indonesia,
23:29 Philippines, Vietnam. In the developing world they need you know they need electricity,
23:36 they need connections so they are going to develop. The question is how you get them to develop
23:42 sustainably and I think there are two things that are necessary. The first is we've got to
23:48 accelerate the development of technology and we've got to work out how we how we do that and secondly
23:54 we've got to to liberate the large amount of private capital that is prepared to go and invest
24:02 in clean energy but it needs projects in an investable form and this is where you need
24:08 concessionary capital, you need risk insurance and you need governments to be helped to put
24:15 these projects in a form in which people can invest. So just to give you a very practical example
24:21 in the work we do in Africa. So the Zambezi river has enormous hydro
24:27 electric potential. It would transform power generation in southern Africa.
24:33 We're putting together one project, there would probably be three projects there
24:39 but it's going to need financing and the investors, the reality is these investors when people say
24:45 well why don't they go and invest in these projects, these investors are pension funds,
24:49 right, they're sovereign funds, they've got obligations to fiduciary obligations to
24:53 their stakeholders. So you've got to have these projects put together in a form in which people
25:00 are prepared to invest and I think that is the critical thing because okay Africa for example
25:05 at the moment's a very small percentage of the emissions but the population is going to double
25:10 in the next 30 years and it's going to develop. So unless it's helped to develop sustainably
25:17 you know we're never going to do it. Who does that, is that, can the World Bank make a difference there?
25:21 The World Bank is I think going to make a difference under its leadership. I know that
25:27 there are proposals that the people organizing COP, the UAE this year will put forward but you
25:33 need a combination of some public and concessionary capital underpinning that investment from the
25:43 private sector because there is money there to invest but when you look at the sums of money
25:48 people are talking about at the moment and you measure it up to the scale of what's needed,
25:52 it's massive. It's not there. Well and the other thing back to the leadership question, I mean
25:56 watching the COP process from afar it seems a little chaotic, a little disorganized. I mean do
26:03 we have the systems in place to make a kind of grand transformation like we need to make to get
26:08 through this? Well I think you just, I think the important thing with a issue like this is to break
26:14 it down into component elements and really analyze what those are. I mean the other thing of course
26:19 is to make the hard to abate sectors, not just oil and gas but you've got steel, aluminium and so on.
26:26 There are a lot of changes that could be made and should be made there that will help but I,
26:31 if I had to pinpoint one issue that I think is absolutely fundamental to resolving this issue,
26:36 it is the issue of finance because I can see it in the countries I'm working in. So again to give
26:41 you an example of Indonesia, it's got obviously, Indonesia it's how many, 17,000 islands, it's got
26:49 huge wind power potential, huge solar potential but they have traditionally, a lot of their power
26:55 generation has been coal-fired but if you're going to substitute that and you're going to end those
27:00 coal-fired power stations early, you've got to have a financial mechanism that means it makes
27:05 sense for someone to come and make that investment and that's, and this is, you know, this is a highly
27:12 technical focused question and the problem with a lot of the, you know, the politics around
27:22 climate change is that it's still at the level of campaigning, okay, I think everyone accepts it's
27:29 a big problem now, that battle has been won and it's got to come out of the hands of the
27:34 campaigners and go into the hands of policy makers that will really figure out how we make a difference.
27:39 So we've been talking about some pretty complicated issues that the world is dealing with
27:44 and as you pointed out it isn't always an encouraging conversation but I'd love for
27:50 you to end us here on a positive note, I mean what makes you hopeful in a world with
28:00 with the geopolitical problems we have, with the climate problems we have, with the leadership
28:06 problems and political problems we have, what makes you feel good about the future?
28:10 Basically that if you take, if you, if you, you take a step out of the day-to-day and and the current
28:18 problems and you look at the broad sweep of history, humanity makes progress and there's
28:24 always a risk I think if you come from a western country that you're very western focused, right,
28:32 whereas if you're in China life is definitely better than it was 25 years ago, if you're in
28:37 India it's definitely better probably than it was even 10 years ago, I mean the countries we're
28:42 working in, okay some of them still got a huge problem, well all of them got big problems, some
28:47 of them not making progress but a lot of them are making progress and you know if you take here
28:55 right and think of the changes that have been made, I mean it's amazing, it's, it's,
29:00 you know even in the 16 years I've been coming here I've seen a massive amount of change,
29:08 so you know and and that's one thing that gives me hope but the other thing is wherever you go in
29:14 the world most people want the same thing really, right, they want to live their lives in peace
29:20 and security, they want to work hard and get on and if they get on they want to be able to,
29:26 you know they want to have an ambitious future for themselves, they're perfectly happy to be
29:32 compassionate at the same time as being ambitious but you know most people wherever they are in the
29:36 world they really want the same things and and you know I think it's, it's despite having been UK
29:44 Prime Minister for 10 years and all the different issues I deal with, I remain, I remain actually
29:50 optimistic and idealistic because I think the one thing about the world today is it is really
29:57 connected, right, I mean look on the cover of your magazine there you've got Mira Murati, right, who's
30:03 a young woman who's one of the leaders now in artificial intelligence, I think I'm right in
30:09 saying was actually brought up in Albania, yeah and by the way Albania, you want to look at a
30:14 country that's a lot different today than when I first came across it 25 years ago, that's another
30:19 example, so you know if you, if you, if you're looking for reasons to be pessimistic you can
30:25 always find them, right, but if you're wanting to be on the hopeful side of history there are
30:32 many reasons to be hopeful, we just gotta do better and try harder at it. Tony Blair, thank you for
30:38 that great tour of the world, really appreciate it, thank you so much. Thank you very much.
30:42 you
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