Experts Debate How the U.S. Should Aproach Global Leadership

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: You’re saying that the idea of leadership is almost a misnomer, misunderstood, and potentially even dangerous. Why do you say that about America?

PETER BEINART, “THE NEW YORK TIMES”: So, first, I think you to have define the word leadership. It doesn’t just mean motherhood and apple pie. It means being in charge. Joe Biden himself said, it means being at the head of the table. I think the United States needs to be at the table, but not necessarily at the head of the table. First of all, the United States doesn’t wield anywhere near the relative power that we did in the — at the beginning of the Cold War. Back then, our GDP was about half of the world’s GDP. It’s now about one-seventh. By many metrics, China already has a larger GDP, and that gap is going to grow. So, it’s first unrealistic. Secondly, it’s not what most Americans want. It reflects a real gap between foreign policy elites and the American people. Poll after poll shows that Americans want America to be engaged in the world, but in a shared partnership. They specifically reject the notion of American leadership in favor of partnership. And, finally, we have to ask ourselves as Americans hard questions about whether we have earned the moral right to claim that we are leaders. We’re the only country that left the Paris climate change agreement. We left the WHO in the middle of a pandemic. We have turned — we have — the Trump administration has wrecked the World Trade Organization. And even before the Trump administration, our post-9/11 wars had created, by one estimate, 37 million refugees. I think we need a little bit of humility. We can be part of the solution, but we have not earned the right, nor do we have the power to be in charge.

AMANPOUR: So, that is a lot there. And I just want to ask you, Kori Schake, having been in the rooms where it happens, so to speak, in the Defense Department, in the State Department advising presidential candidates on a more traditionalist foreign policy, should America be at the table, and not at the head of the table? What kind of difference would that make?

KORI SCHAKE, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL AND STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: It would make an enormous difference, because being at the table, being just one of many is not sufficient to sustain the existing order against the challenges that are being pushed forward by China and by others. There’s a reason that the countries that have the policies that Peter is advocating for the United States, those are the very countries that desperately want a return to American leadership, because they understand that, unless the United States gathers around us like-minded countries to establish and enforce the rules, somebody else will, and you will like those rules a lot less than you will like the rules that the United States and its friends created out of the ashes of World War II.