Steven Bartlett

In the 90s, Americans and Europeans became convinced that everything was best in the best of all possible worlds.

And we didn't have to do anything in particular to maintain our democracies because democracy was the best system and we just won the Cold War and it was all going to be fine.

And we lost sight of the ways in which democracy was beginning to slip and we were beginning to lose things.

And I think it was just a sense of complacency.

And above all, it was a sense of inevitability.

It's inevitable.

We've won the war of ideas.

The war of ideas is over.

And that's why we missed the rise of Russia.

We missed the significance of China.

And we missed a lot of those things because we were so sure that we were just winning.

It's a cycle, but my point is that the cycles aren't predictable.

I mean, you can stop the cycle.

You can reverse the cycle.

Countries can and do change their trajectory.

I've lived a lot of my life in Poland.

First went there in the 1980s.

My husband is Polish and so on.

Poland is a completely different country from what it was 30 years ago.

And it's a country that has really changed itself in ways that weren't necessarily predictable in 1990.