What is America’s Place in the World Order Post COVID-19?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now we do live in a complex and interconnected world, where what happens in China or Russia or anywhere can impact the lives of those thousands of miles away in the United States and elsewhere. The former State Department official Richard Haass highlights this oft- forgot truth in his new book, “The World: A Brief Introduction.” From climate change and counterterrorism to the current pandemic, Haass says that we need to abandon rivalry and embrace global cooperation. Here he is talking to our Walter Isaacson about how to get there.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And welcome, Richard Haass, to the show.

RICHARD HAASS, AUTHOR, “THE WORLD: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION”: Great to be with you, my friend.

ISAACSON: So, what has this coronavirus pandemic taught us about how the world is interconnected?

HAASS: Well, as your question suggests, it’s taught us that the world is interconnected in profound ways. What begins in Wuhan clearly doesn’t stay in Wuhan. It spreads far and wide and quickly. And this is not a one-off. This event itself was predicted by many. Today, we’re worrying about COVID-19. But the day will come, Walter, you and I will worry about COVID-23 or COVID-28 or some bacteria that decides it’s resistant to all sorts of antibiotics. In the meantime, we had guys from Afghanistan who, on 9/11, attacked the United States killed, nearly 3,000 people. Climate change is essentially a gathering, as well as daily, reality. So, what this tells me is that globalization is real, it’s unavoidable. What — where there’s choice is in how to respond to it. But I think the corollary is, not responding to it is incredibly foolish. We can be the ostrich and put the proverbial head in the sand, but the tide is coming in, and we are going to be washed away.

ISAACSON: You have just come out with a book, a really great book — I loved reading it called — “The World: A Brief Introduction.” What does that book tell us that’s useful in figuring out how to deal with this coronavirus?

HAASS: Well, to some extent, it’s a bit of a warning in the sense that it tells us that the world is so fundamental to our lives, and too many Americans aren’t up to speed or aware of it. And in some ways, the book is meant, to use a strong word, something of an indictment of the American educational system, K-12, as well as too many colleges and universities, where we’re graduating all these people, but their education is woefully incomplete. They’re simply not prepared. They’re not literate in the world that they’re going to enter and that is going to be so fundamental to their future as citizens, as well as simply as individuals, making career choices, business choices, investment choices, what have you. So, I think it tells us, one, there’s an enormous gap between what Americans know and what they should know. More broadly, I think it tells us there’s a gap in the world between the challenges that are coming at us and our foreign policy. Isolationism is a dead end. Unilateralism is a dead end. We really do need collective approaches to collective challenges, but we simply haven’t gotten close to where we need to be.

ISAACSON: You have run the Council on Foreign Relations for a couple of decades almost. It has “Foreign Affairs” magazine, which is the premier journal about international affairs. And yet, as you just said, people in this country have become less literate about the world. Why is that?

HAASS: That’s a question I scratch my head about. Partially, it’s what I just referred to. We don’t teach it. Or, if we teach it, we don’t require it. Indeed, that’s what led to this book. I met this talented young man who’s going into his senior year at Stanford. He was going to get a degree in computer sciences. And what he hadn’t studied, to me, was much more interesting than what he had studied. The media, which you know, with very few exceptions, simply doesn’t cover the world anything like it did when you and I were coming of age. I think there also might be something peculiarly American in this. We have a long tradition of isolationism. We’re a continental country. We have gotten used to almost assuming our centrality in the world, without much worrying about what others think or what the world could do to us. So, I think that we, as Americans, in some ways bring certain traditions, almost baggage, because it gets in the way of an appreciation of how important the world is. Too much talk about indispensable America, exceptional America. Not enough talk about the reality that we’re only 4 percent of the world’s population, maybe a fifth of the world’s economy.

ISAACSON: In the past two decades, we have seen both in the United States and around the world a backlash against globalization, a backlash against trade and immigration and other things. Donald Trump tapped into that beef with globalization with his slogan America first. How would you try to counteract that if you were going to argue against an America-first policy?

HAASS: Well, I tried with then candidate Donald Trump. And as history has shown, I clearly failed miserably. He came into office with two very strongly held views. One, we just alluded to, the idea that trade has been rigged against us and seemed to — it’s almost as if he were still running a business, and only looked at the cost side of the ledger and never at the revenue side of the ledger. But that’s part of it. The other is almost writ large. He looks at the course of American foreign policy of the last seven, eight — seven-and-a-half decades since World War II, and, again, he only sees the mistakes and the costs, and he takes for granted the fact that there hasn’t been a great power war, that the Cold War stayed cold. He seems to ignore the increase in living standards, seems to ignore the lengthening of the average lifespan, all that American influence has done in terms of promoting democracy. So, his view is very narrowly economic, very narrowly on the downside. So, when he talks about America first, it’s based upon essentially his view, which I think is seriously wrong, that involvement in the world has been an overwhelming net cost. I would see it as an overwhelming net gain. And I think he doesn’t often see the connections between what happens in the world, for better and for worse, and what happens here. As you say, in many ways, he’s a reflection of where a lot of the population is. Unfortunately, my own view, it means often promoting or pursuing policies that are not in our collective self-interest.

ISAACSON: He’s blamed China, the president has, for this virus and almost seemed as if we’re going to get into a dispute with China over things. Why do we need to be more careful, or do we need to be more careful about our relationship with China?

HAASS: I’m worried about where this is heading. U.S.-Chinese relations were not great before the crisis. They were already deteriorating. And now they’re — the acceleration of the deterioration is taking place. Look, there’s plenty of reasons to be unhappy with China. How they have handled the outbreak of COVID-19 is one, their harsh repression at home, how they have not honored the agreement with the British over Hong Kong, how they have militarized the South China Sea, how they have stolen intellectual property. I get. It’s a long litany, but — and it’s an important but — I think we exaggerate to some extent China’s ambitions. I don’t think they’re akin to what the Soviet Union was. I think we underestimate some of their internal problems, the implications of slower economic growth, their environmental degradation, the aging demography, how they have mishandled this — this crisis. And, also, we actually want their help in some issues. If we’re worried about climate change or pandemics or North Korea, it would be nice to have China in the boat rowing with us. We can tackle these challenges without them, but we’re far better off with them. I’d even say, imagine we were successful, Walter, in pushing against — pushing back against China in every area. I would suggest we would still, though, be vulnerable to the effects of these global challenges. So, what this suggests to me is, we’re at a moment in history where traditional foreign policy that places great power rivalry at the center is simply out of date. Yes, great power rivalry needs to remain part of American foreign policy. But we actually need a larger foreign policy for a global era in which climate, pandemics, terror, proliferation, all these global manifestations, these are probably going to be far more profound in their effects on American well-being this century.

ISAACSON: Your book about the world that just came out begins back in the 1600s, when the idea of the nation state arises. How powerful is the concept of a nation state today, given all of the cross-border and international issues we have to deal with?

HAASS: Well, interestingly enough, the more there are these cross-border and other issues we have to deal with, the nation state fights back. It’s still the basic unit of account in international relations. It explains why so many groups who don’t have their own state still want to — still want to get one. It’s the coin of the realm. But I think a really interesting thing is going on in the field. In some ways, to me, it’s the most — it’s the most interesting question now, Walter. You hearken back to the 1600s, to the 17th century, the Treaty of Westphalia, and that was the birth of the idea of sovereignty of nation states. And for the last nearly, what, 400 years, they have been the unit of account. And sovereignty, the idea that states don’t meddle in each other’s affairs, don’t invade one another, that’s been a stabilizing development. It was actually a big, innovative idea. But what’s so interesting now is, we have reached a point where to ignore what goes on in another state inside its borders can be dangerous to us. I’m not simply talking about humanitarian issues, like — like genocide. I don’t mean to dismiss those. But look at what Brazil is doing. Brazil is gradually destroying the rain forest. Now, you could say, well, that’s on their territory. It’s their right. But hold it. The rest of us pay the bill for that in terms of climate change. Or with 9/11, we learned, when the Taliban government in Afghanistan allowed terrorists, al Qaeda, to operate freely, 3,000 people here lost their lives in a day. What happened in China this time obviously has implications for us. So, we actually have — we have reached the point where the question I would say for people in my business is, how do we try to preserve the good sides of sovereignty? We don’t want Russia continuing to do in Ukraine what it’s done. But how do we take into account that we don’t have the luxury of a hands-off attitude anymore, because what goes on in virtually every country affects our welfare and our well-being? And we’re just beginning to wrestle with that, with what I would call a real intellectual and foreign policy dilemma.

ISAACSON: We have a very complex relationship with Russia right now. And, of course, President Trump and President Putin have their own complex relationship. How would you get that back onto an even keel?

HAASS: Going to be tough, because Russia, under Putin, rejects a lot of the basics of how we think international relations ought to be run, the way they have reacted in Ukraine and so forth. We also can’t walk back the clock. We could have a debate on another show about the wisdom, or lack of it, of NATO enlargement and so forth. I would focus on the nuclear domain. That’s probably the principal area where Russia is still a superpower. It’s the one area where the current world really reflects the Cold War world, where there’s the two of us and then there’s everybody else. The principal nuclear arms control agreements are due to expire in February. So, whoever wins this election, whether it’s President Trump or Vice President Biden, is only going to have a few weeks to essentially decide what to do. I don’t want to add an overlay or reintroduce strategic nuclear competition into this world. We have got plenty, and then some, on our plates. After that, I don’t know if there’s an answer with Russia. I would — I would be willing to spend time talking with them. I have never thought that diplomacy was a favor we bestow on Russia or anybody else. But I would be firm. I would be really firm about pushing back on their intervention, interference in our politics. And I would let Mr. Putin know that, if he continues to do that, his own position, politically, would not be something that we would consider to be hands-off.

ISAACSON: To what extent do you think coronavirus is going to disrupt everything from supply chains, to European integration, and create a whole new world? Or do you think, once it’s passed, we will be able to restore the type of globalism that we were trying to create 20, 30 years ago?

HAASS: Can I get give you an option three?

ISAACSON: Yes.

HAASS: I think what it’s going to…

ISAACSON: Go for it.

HAASS: What I think it’s going to do is reinforce trends that were already under way, but reinforce them, accelerate them, deepen them. In Europe, for example, the whole momentum of the European project was essentially spent. Brexit was the most powerful manifestation of it. But I think what’s going to happen now is, we’re going to see the pendulum swing away from Brussels, away from common European institutions, and towards individual governments. And there are times in Europe when you might — people might get up and say, we want to advance the European project. Now they’d better focus on preserving it. Or in the area of trade, I actually think this idea of supply chain disruption is going to be quite powerful. I think you will see bipartisan support for either diversification of external dependence or, more likely, calls for domestic manufacturing and stockpiling of critical materials, just like we did, what, 40, 50 years ago with oil. I think you’re going to see a long list of elements. Could be certain technologies. It could be maybe things that go into medicine. And people might say, we don’t want to have to — we don’t want to be dependent on importing 80 percent of this drug from India or 90 percent of this drug from China. We don’t know what could happen that would shut it off. Therefore, we have got to start producing it and stockpiling it ourselves. And the question will be, how do you preserve the upside of open trade, if everybody, in the name of national security, starts doing that sort of a self-sufficiency move? So, I think it’s going to be high on the agenda about how we manage this new balance between individual countries and the world they live in.

ISAACSON: If the U.S. continues to abdicate and distance itself from a position of world leadership, what will the new world look like after that? Will China be the dominant player?

HAASS: I have given a lot of thought to that question. And I think the word abdication is right. We haven’t been replaced. We haven’t been pushed out. We have simply shrugged our shoulders and said, we’re kind of tired of this role, and we want to put our feet up on the cushions here. I don’t think the alternative to a U.S.-led world is a China-led world. I’m not sure China has the ambitions. I’m not sure China has a model that others want to emulate. Indeed, I’m sure it does not. I don’t see anybody else with the habits, the capabilities, the will to do it. I actually think, Walter, that the alternative to a U.S.-led world is a nobody-led world. My last book had the word disarray in the title. And that was already happening as the United States was pulling back from the world. And I think, if we continue to, it’ll happen in spades. The world will just get messier, and in two ways. We will see more and more of the familiar kind of frictions between countries. We will probably see growing problems within them. And then the gap between global challenges and global responses, already large, will get even larger. And that is not a world we want to see. But that could be our future, if we don’t do something about it. The good news is, we can still do something about it. The question mark — the question mark is whether we will. You have written so many powerful history books. And the one lesson I take from my experience is, so little is inevitable. So much matters on what those who do have responsibility and power decide to do. So, the good news here is, we can see a lot of the future is yet to be decided. The bad news, though, is, it won’t work out if we simply let it — let it run its course.

ISAACSON: Richard Haass, thank you for joining us.

HAASS: Thank you.