Several of your books discuss the implications of globalization on our modern world. Is there evidence that our world is globalizing too quickly? How can we expect this trend of globalization to change over the next decade?

Whether it is happening too quickly or too slowly, I do not know, and I do not know whether that is good or bad—it all depends how you manage it. I do not think the hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese who have been lifted out of poverty because their governments have adopted strategies of global trade and integration would tell you that globalization is happening too quickly.

But I think there are people who care deeply and rightly about issues like the environment who would tell you that it is happening way too fast because the cost of integrating all these people into the global economy creates a huge loss of biodiversity; more land gets gobbled up for factories, roads, highways, or airports.

I just finished a book called The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, and it is about the leveling of the competitive playing field. I think that is what the next phase of globalization is going to be all about—that more people from more places, on more days, in more ways, are going to be able to collaborate on more different kinds of work and compete for more different kinds of work than any time before in the history of the world. It is this leveling of the competitive and collaborative playing fields on the individual level, rather than the level of the country or the company, that I think defines the next stage of globalization.

Will a truly globalized international system preclude countries from pursuing doctrines of strong unilateralism? If so, how much autonomy should a state be willing to sacrifice for a globalized world?

That depends on the country and its context, but look at the case of Taiwan and China. Taiwan is led by a government that favors formal independence from China; if Taiwan moved in that direction, it could conceivably trigger war with China. Just a few weeks ago, there were parliamentary elections in China where the ruling party—the pro-independence party that did not control the Taiwanese parliament—was hoping to win those elections so that both the Taiwanese government and the Taiwanese parliament would be dominated by forces favoring independence.

But in a very surprising outcome, the Taiwanese people voted against the pro-independence parties and voted for those parties favoring an ambiguous stance on Taiwanese independence, so that Taiwan could continue economic integration with the Chinese mainland. Those forces won, which is a classic case of globalization restraining geopolitics. The Taiwanese people basically chose motherboards over motherland. Every personal computer today is made through a supply chain that runs from coastal China through Taiwan into Malaysia. Ultimately Taiwan’s role in that global supply chain, which has been so important for its global economy, was more important than trying to make a lurch towards independence.

Having seen the end of the Saddam Hussein regime, have we witnessed the inevitable fate of every dictatorial regime, or will there be room for dictatorships in a globalized or “flat” world?

There is still plenty of room for dictatorship in a flat world, but usually it is because you have some exogenous source of income where you really do not need to open up your society. The reason you have autocratic, monarchical, or dictatorial governments in the Arab world is because the region is awash with oil. The leaders do not have to tax their people because they have oil income and they never have to listen to their people either; there is no representation without taxation. That is a big reason for this continued lack of democracy in the Arab world, but you do need some exogenous source of income. Or you need, in the case of countries in Africa, to have such a broken society that leaders can rule no matter what is going on down below them. So you are going to have your North Koreas, you are going to have your Arab autocracies, and you are going to have your Latin American or African self-dictatorships, but in the end all the pressures on these regimes will come from the very obvious fact that countries that are globalizing and opening up to the world are empowering their people to innovate and create. This requires a free flow of ideas and these countries are going to win out.

You have often been praised for your ability to explain complicated foreign policy ideas in simple and concrete terms. Do you find it difficult to simplify these complicated ideas for the masses?

I have always described myself as a translator from English to English. I really try to take complicated subjects and break them down first for myself so I understand them. When you are dealing with an issue like the interactions between technology and globalization and geopolitics, it becomes really complicated and takes an enormous amount of time and study to first understand them from the inside.You cannot simplify something if you do not understand it, or you cannot simplify it well in a way that captures its inner truth—reduces it to something that people can grasp onto. So the trick is not to simplify—anyone can do that—the trick is to simplify the basic complexity of something, and that is much more difficult. You really have to know something from the inside out. You also have to take it apart and then put it back together. That is what I try to do.

In many ways, the media plays one of the most influential roles in shaping both decisions of US policymakers and the direction of public opinion. What general trend, if any, do you see emerging in our modern media and how do you see the media’s role changing in a globalized world?

I think the most interesting new trend is the emergence of weblogs all over the world. I followed the war in Iraq, in part thanks to Iraqi bloggers. That is a totally unprecedented situation where you have a single person and newspapers on the ground reporting, and sometimes competing, directly. I think we have just seen the beginning of that phenomenon. If I were to point to one thing that is changing and that is going to have a big impact both on how we consume news and even on how big newspapers operate, it will be the emergence of the blogger that is able, with a single video camera or a single cell phone, to get their message out to a global audience.