A Year to Make a Decade
A Tech and Foreign Policy Event + A Letter From The Future
The Red Button Club’s next event is this coming Wednesday 20th May from 8pm.
For the first time, we’ll be welcoming speakers who will be answering the following question:
What is one thing someone working in foreign policy should know about tech?
The speakers are:
Steve Feldstein from the Carnegie Endowment, with a focus on surveillance tech
Cansu Bayrak from Bethnal Green Ventures, with a focus on tech and soft power
Chris McNaboe from The Carter Center, with a focus on tech and conflict
Lisa Schirch from the Toda Institute, with a focus on social media and polarisation
So if you’re interested in joining the conversation, this is the only red button you should be pressing:
And in another first for The Red Button Club, we’re also pleased to feature a letter from the UK’s Secretary of State for Global Engagement.
A Year to Make a Decade
30 December 2029
By Joshua Mills, former UK Secretary of State for Global Engagement, 2026-2029
As the 2020s end and we shift into the 2030s, I’m reminded about a saying attributed to Bill Gates, one of the major tech leaders of the 2010s:
Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
Mr Gates was right about one thing: we have achieved a huge amount in the last ten years. But he was wrong about the importance of a year. Let me explain.
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 isn’t something people talk about much anymore. For many it’s a hazy memory of yo-yoing in and out of ‘lockdowns’. But that year set the world on the path to the change we see today.
The critical turning point came in December 2020, shortly after the COVID-19 vaccine was announced. The United Kingdom convened over a hundred countries at the Oxford Summit. First, they agreed to cooperate on the vaccine’s production to ensure that every person could be guaranteed a dose within 6 months. Second, and more radically, they agreed that the order of distribution would be decided purely on the basis of need: nationality would not determine who got the vaccine first.
None of this was assured. The whole initiative was initially unpopular amongst a fearful population in the midst of a brutal second wave. But then-Prime Minister Johnson was proven right in tenaciously pressing on: this giant act of international solidarity somehow turned our fear into hopeful confidence. And even with the G2 absent - leaders in both China and the US were doubling down on nationalist platforms at the time - the Oxford Summit jolted the G-Other into action on other global problems.
What we did with our new found confidence and solidarity is now well known: a hugely ambitious agenda was established by the G-Other on the side-lines of COP26. This unleashed a wave of radical green policies crafted by villages, towns and cities around the world. These actions set us on the path to the Green Deals which transformed how we live, work and relate to one another. With atmospheric carbon dioxide levels now falling back towards 450 PPM, we are on a trajectory away from the danger zone.
While it was a slower march, the centrality of trust, openness and inclusion to our political systems became much more widely accepted. The spectre of tech-totalitarianism has retreated – including in China. This shift, that began as a means of escaping the 2020 pandemic, was only sustained through patient but deliberate support by the global community to those fighting for change. We should be proud of how the United Kingdom led on this issue, but recognise that it was not achievable alone.
It is true that the enormous transitions of the last decade led to violent upheaval in some places. The scars of Saudi Arabia’s collapse, for example, are still with us. But our international institutions have been able mediate peaceful political transitions and prevent a range of risks from escalating into conflicts. This empowered system means that today we have the lowest levels of global violence on record.
Things are far from perfect. The exponential progress in technology continues to outpace our ability to manage its worst excesses. While better managed than in the past, the movement of people continues to strain relations between countries and societies. And of course, as the 2028 Ebola crisis bought home, we still live with the constant threat of many infectious disease.
And yet we’ve undergone a green transformation, a quiet political revolution, and made the world much safer. We’re on track to demonstrate real progress against the SDGs. Not bad for a decade, especially one kicked off by a pandemic.
Decisions made in the very first year of this decade set the direction of travel to somewhere better than before. It wasn’t just about sharing a vaccine fairly. It was about recognising that we’re in this together and we always will be. Let’s keep this in the back of our minds for decisions made in the year 2030.