In a world increasingly marked by geopolitical tensions, climate change, and dwindling natural resources, uncertainty seems to be our only constant.

Historically, some nations crumble in the face of crises, while others emerge unscathed. What factors determine a country's resilience?

Renowned science writer and UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond, celebrated for his seminal work "Guns, Germs, and Steel," stands out as a quintessential polymath public intellectual. His expertise spans geography, evolutionary biology, history, and popular science.

Diamond's lifelong fascination revolves around understanding the rise and fall of civilizations, nations, and societies. What strategies enable some to thrive despite internal and external pressures, while others falter?

In his 1997 bestseller, "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Diamond examined how societies' responses to environmental challenges played a pivotal role in the fate of ancient civilizations. His 2019 work, "Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis," offers a clinical psychology perspective, identifying twelve key factors that enable nations to successfully navigate crises and persistent challenges.

Today's Taiwan faces uncertainties from cross-strait tensions, the U.S.-China rivalry, political strife, identity issues, and extreme weather events, all testing the island's wisdom and resolve.

In an interview, Diamond shares his insights on how Taiwan can bolster its resilience to meet current challenges. He also highlights Taiwan's potential to contribute to global crisis management strategies. Here are the interview highlights:

My wife is a clinical psychologist, so I hear a lot from her about successful and unsuccessful people. Those parallels between individual people and whole countries in solving their crises inspired my most recent book Upheaval.

Some people, and some countries, are honest in acknowledging their problems, and in taking responsibility for their problems.

Key 1: Honest Self-Assessment

Like Singapore’s honesty in recognizing and solving its problems at the time of its independence, other countries like Norway, Costa Rica, and Botswana have solved their crises and become richer than their neighbors. What’s the difference between the successful countries and the unsuccessful countries?

You’ve undoubtedly noticed that governments of some potentially rich countries (like Argentina!) constantly adopt disastrous policies, and lurch from one crisis to another. 

I regret that my own country, the USA, now tends to blame its problems on Mexico and Canada and China rather than on its own mistakes.

How can polarized democracies be consolidated? My answer: with great difficulty!

The United States, the United Kingdom, and other polarized democracies are currently finding it hard to overcome their polarization. That’s because the Internet and the electronic revolutions have created “niche media.” That means: today, there are hundreds of television stations and newspapers and blogs, each appealing to a different niche of people. People get their prejudiced niche information from the one station or newspaper or blog that agrees with their niche prejudice. That was different when I was a child: formerly, even the biggest American cities had just one television station and just one or two newspapers, so everyone got the same information.

If all citizens of a democracy realize that they are exposed to the same dreadful danger, they may realize that the only way to overcome that danger is to set aside their polarized views.

That seems to be happening now in the United States. Republicans and Democrats have disagreed about everything, including aid to Ukraine. But, just two weeks ago, the leading Republican congressman in Washington woke up and realized that a defeat of Ukraine by Russia would be a disaster for the United States. He managed to convince a few dozen other Republican Congressmen, along with all of the Democrat congressmen, to vote for military aid to Ukraine. We shall see whether we polarized Americans will wake up about other disasters potentially facing us.

Key 2: Learning from Past Mistakes

Some people, and some countries, learn from their previous mistakes and previous crises, while others don’t. That’s why life is often so hard and painful for young people, who are facing big crises for the first time in their lives – while older people have been through crises before and have learned to deal with crises more calmly.

That’s also true for countries. For example, the British Navy has fought lots of wars at sea, and has had lots of its ships sunk. As a result, British naval officers at their naval academies spend lots of time studying British naval history. That helped them become much more resilient in World War Two and in the Falkland war than were German and Argentinian naval officers, who hadn’t learned from experiences of their ships being sunk.

Key 3: Learning from Others

Both people and countries can overcome crises by learning from how other people and other countries have overcome crises. In a crisis, it helps to use other people and other countries as models.

An outstanding example is Japan in the Meiji era that began in 1868. Japan then risked being conquered by aggressive western countries. But Japan used those western countries themselves as models, became strong, and avoided being subjugated by the west — until Japan began making disastrous mistakes in the 1930s.

One rule is: communicate constantly with those powerful neighbors, even if you don’t like them, and even if you are afraid of them!

If you nevertheless communicate with them constantly, they won’t be surprised by what you might do, and they won’t overreact in ignorance. That’s a lesson that Finland, a small country with only a few million people, learned from its war against the giant Soviet Union during World War Two.

After World War II, Finnish government officials at every level communicated frequently with their Russian counterparts. Of course, Finns dislike Russians, but Russia learned to trust Finland. At least, that was true until Russia’s recent changes of policies.

That illustrates that, even if a small country behaves carefully and communicates constantly with powerful neighbors, that doesn’t guarantee success. There was nothing that Poland could do in 1939 to avoid invasion by Nazi Germany.

Key 4: National Unity

A nation’s national identity consists of the features of its culture and its history that all of its citizens share, and of which it is proud, and that hold the country together.

If a country’s citizens ignore their shared national identity, and instead emphasize their differences – then the country will be weakened by internal polarization, and will be weakened at dealing with external threats.

An example is the former European nation of Czechoslovakia, whose citizens before World War II consisted of two similar but different peoples. Czechoslovakia became threatened by Nazi Germany. In March 1939 the Slovak people made the fatal mistake of declaring independence and separating from the Czech people. The result was that Nazi Germany conquered both the Czechs and the Slovaks.

Taiwan, like Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1939, consists of several peoples who arrived at different times: the oldest settlers of Taiwan, who arrived from coastal Southern China more than 6000 years ago; others who arrived from China almost 2000 years ago and then 150 years ago; and then all those others who arrived from China almost 80 years ago. Those peoples of yours are different, but related.

The strength and the survival of Taiwan will depend upon your different but related peoples emphasizing the shared things and the national identity that holds your country together.

Taiwan's Global Contribution

One country alone can’t solve world inequality and world resource depletion. But one country alone can deal with its own problems of national inequality and national resource depletion.

Taiwan, as a major fishing nation, can learn to manage fishing around its coasts and in the high seas. That’s good policy for Taiwan, and it could also set an example for other countries with fishing fleets.

On the one hand, Taiwan is a small island, with less than one percent of the world’s population. But Taiwan is highly productive and industrialized.

Hence Taiwan’s fossil fuel consumption and fishing fleets contribute more to climate change, and to depletion of world fisheries, than do fossil fuel consumption and fishing fleets of most other similar-sized parts of the world.

Hence Taiwan does have a much greater effect on the world than one would expect just from Taiwan’s modest-sized population. 

Even if the rest of the world foolishly continues to contribute to global warming, Taiwan can try to develop local measures to reduce global warming’s local impact on Taiwan.

Have you read?

• What is Propping Up China’s Economic Numbers?
• Engineers of the Human Soul
• The Second Ma-Xi Meeting: Paving the Way for Beijing to Focus on the Economy
• Ma-Xi Meeting 9 Years Later: Xi's Final Goodwill?

Uploaded by Ian Huang