Global war AND existential risks are inevitable unless the U.S. avoids relative economic decline

HAASS: No, absolutely. I think it's exactly right. And it's really interesting to ask, why is this the case? And I think you're right Meghna, it is bipartisan, it crosses party lines. I think there's a sense that foreign policy has costs more than its benefited us people look at Iraq, they look at the World War, also in Afghanistan. And they simply, correctly I would say, don't think in any way either was worth it. These issues are not taught in our schools, or if they are taught, they're not required. So, you can graduate from Harvard, or Stanford or Princeton, and have no background whatsoever in international relations or in history. Our media, for the most part doesn't cover these issues. Over the last 20-30 years, there's been a real reduction in the degree of international coverage. So, most Americans simply don't see the connection between what goes on in the world and what goes on here in the United States.

So, you know, here was this place called Wuhan where a virus broke out. And what we've learned in an extraordinarily expensive way, is that nothing stays local for long. What happens in Wuhan doesn't stay in Wuhan, but it travels. And this has cost us trillions of dollars. And already what more than 40,000 lives and the toll keeps mounting by the hour. This is an expensive lesson in why isolationism is not an option in a global world. And the real question is, will we learn that lesson? Will we learn the right lesson? Will we basically say we have got to get more involved in the world to prepare for the next pandemic? To do something about climate change? To do something about structuring the world, the digital world so it's positive and not negative? Are we still going to deal say with the threat of terrorism or proliferation? The real question, for me, is coming out of this, do we have the bandwidth Do we have the resources to have we learned the lesson that we can't isolate ourselves from what goes on in the world and to do that safely?

MEGHNA: I think that's a good question, Richard, because it seems to me that for there's a generation of Americans out there who most often see the effects of US foreign policy through the instruments of failed wars. I'm just going to put it like that. There have not been enough examples of the positive benefits of American foreign policy or American leaders and that is part of what is causing people to doubt right now. And on that point, I would like to actually take a caller who has something to say about this. So let's go to Jeremy, who's calling from Racine, Wisconsin. Jeremy, what's your thoughts?

JEREMY: Alright, thanks for taking my call. I believe that we're coming into a point in our history. That is it's more of like an institutional crisis within our government and its inability to function with each other to have a clear intent, and to come together with all the resources to accomplish that. That intent clearly and to our desirable outcomes, given the fact what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq. We went in Iraq, we hosted Saddam Hussein, and then we kind of sat around and said, “now what”?. We just wasted incredible amount of lives, resources and money to to exert our foreign policy in an inefficient way. We just we have to restructure how we go about our foreign policy, how do we interact with other nations, instead of sending the big stick every time something goes wrong, we need to start working on better diplomacy and things like that. And Donald Trump is probably what I would consider, he is like, the fox in the henhouse. The American people just sent him into the henhouse, and he's just wreaking havoc all over the federal government. And that's pretty much what a lot of people feel right now. They just are tired with inability to come together and actually fix something and make it coherent, that everybody can understand. Yeah.

MEGHNA: Well, Jeremy, thank you for that thought. Richard Haass, did you want to respond to him?

HAASS: Sure. Let me react to Jeremy. I think he's right, that we've overused the military tool, and we've underused other tools, including diplomacy, foreign aid, and so forth. He points to the dangers of overreach in Iraq, Afghanistan, Jack before mentioned Vietnam, but I also think there's a real danger of underreach of the United States does too little. And you said Meghna, that people don't see the benefits. Well, think about it, the first half of the century, we had two enormous world wars, when the United States was detached from the world. We've avoided a world war between or among the great powers for the last 75 years, in large part because the United States has been involved. We've seen an enormous growth in the number of people who live in democracies and the degree of freedom. We've seen enormous improvements in the standard of living and the extension of lifespans. So, the last 70-75 years have actually been the most successful era of human history ever. Ever.

MEGHNA: Some would say it's anomalous. Yeah. Someone say it's an anomalous 70 years.

HAASS: Well, that's, to me, that's the big question. Were the last 70-75 years? Or are they the Can we make them the new normal? Can we extend them? Or did they become something of an aberration? And do we go back to the kind of world that for centuries before were we you know, that was the norm, World War One, World War Two constant wars in Europe? And that's where we are I actually think we're at one of those crossroads in history. And the issue for us. Another way to think about it: are we the United States, after World War One that's going to retreat from the world and let it and let it unravel? Or are we the United States after World War Two, that's going to have a creative surge, and try to restructure the world to deal with the challenges of this generation? And I think that is the fundamental question.

MEGHNA: And it is a very compelling one. Jack, did you do you have some I know, you have some thoughts on that?

BEATTY: Well, I mean, that frames it will weigh and, and, you know, to be more specific will the election, even touch on this, you know, in in 2016, we had a Secretary of State running for president and she lost to a man who said, I know more about war than the generals and I alone can fix it. And I get my ideas about foreign policy from the Sunday shows. That showed what at least, you know, a decisive Electoral College majority thought about foreign policy. And Trump isn't going to run as the leader of the free world. He's going to run as ‘America First’, ‘America alone’, ‘America, The Wall’ is his metaphor. And I don't see how it keeps out. dizzy, but nevermind. In other words, that's going to be on the ballot and America's role in the world and his will Joe Biden who you know, can seem like yesterday's man in so many ways. Will Joe Biden rise to that and say no, even though it's difficult for Americans in theu may have to spend money in foreign places to deal with threats. We have to do it. Will he argue that it will he just simply let Trump American first carry that.

MEGHNA: Well, when we come back, we're going to talk about what the possibilities are in this moment. So Richard Haass and Jack Beatty standby for just a moment. This is On Point.

MEGHNA: This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti, we're talking with Richard Haass. He's President of the Council on Foreign Relations. He's also a veteran diplomat who served under four presidents. His recent essay in Foreign Affairs magazine is headlined, The Pandemic Will Accelerate History, Rather Than Reshape It. And we have a link to it at onpointradio.org. He has a forthcoming book due out in May called The World A Brief Introduction. And Jack Beatty On Point news analyst joins us as well. Richard, I wanted to talk with you and Jack about, you know about specific possibilities also that present themselves in this moment, and let's get very granular. I mean, let's talk about North Korea right now. Because even in the midst of this pandemic, we could be at a turning point there with, you know, questions around the health of Kim Jong Un. I mean, is the US positioned right now to take advantage of whatever possibility might be emerging on the Korean peninsula?

HAASS: Well, you're right. Anytime there's a crisis there, there are inevitably possibilities. One obvious one is in the area of improving global health governance. How do we increase the odds that the next outbreak of a disease does not lead to a global pandemic. In the case of North Korea, it's a little bit hard to read, it's in some ways the most closed country in the world. But, this could lead to a degree of instability, which on one hand, would be threatening, given their dozens of nuclear weapons could lead to significant refugee flows. But it could also, possibly, set in motion trends that would end the division of the Korean Peninsula. This is one of last holdout of the post World War Two situation, you still have a divided peninsula between a closed communist north and a democratic open south. It's the most armed border in the world. So it's just possible that this could set in motion trends. So I would very much hope the United States was talking to the government in Seoul and South Korea, and to Chinese about how we will manage a situation if there is a instability in North Korea. This could become a moment to at a minimum deal with the nuclear challenge in the North, and possibly even the, again, the fundamental division of the Peninsula.

MEGHNA: In fact, you tweeted just yesterday that it's in fact essential for the US, China and South Korea to stay in close contact right now about this?

HAASS: Oh, absolutely. Because you can imagine you have a situation where you suddenly have hundreds of thousands of refugees, going from North Korea, either into South Korea, or into China. China might be tempted to intervene well, so might South Korea, so might the United States. Well, we don't want to have a situation where suddenly you have a chaos and various armies moving forward. So, we've got to manage this at a minimum to avoid a bad situation becoming something incomparably worse. But also to see if we can steer the situation to a lasting outcome that would also be better. This really requires intimate choreography among Beijing, Seoul and Washington.

MEGHNA: But let me ask you, though, honestly, given the trend that you write about in your, in your Foreign Affairs article that we've been watching over the past 15 years or so. Do you have any faith that that cooperation would actually happen?

HAASS: I have very little faith, though, on the ground, the military they are is quite significant. And it's a US/UN force and they are in close touch with the South Koreans. We have some connections to the Chinese, but I worry about it, quite honestly, I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. People are so distracted for good reason. By the COVID-19. The US/Chinese relationship was in bad shape before this crisis, is now in worse shape. The US South Korean relationship hasn't been great. The President has been attacking the alliance trying to get the South Koreans to pay much more. So, I am not sure that we are up to the challenge. And again, North Korea is an extraordinarily difficult country to try to act in simply again, because it's the most shut off from the rest of the world. You know, we're sitting here talking about this and quite honestly, we do not know, either what the health reality is facing the North Korean leader or what, if anything, planning might be in place for succession.

MEGHNA: Right. I also feel like it's a very good example about the choice that you and Jack have been talking about that the United States is on the cusp of having to make about what kind of nation it's going to be because the issue of North Korea and the Korean Peninsula cannot be solved without the direct involvement of the United States and China. So that brings me back to this underlying question. Richard, can you can you imagine, imagine a new model of American national security, a new paradigm of American national security, that doesn't have American primacy on the world stage at its heart?

HAASS: Primacy can be understood as a fact of life or a goal. I don't think our goal ought to be one of primacy. We can't control that, because primacy is about relative strength. Right now, that the United States is still the world's most powerful military, we are the world's largest single economy. But the fact is, for all of our strength, we can't tackle the emerging problems in the world on our own. We can't maintain global health unilaterally, we obviously can't deal with climate change by ourselves. We can't control proliferation or terrorism, or set the rules for cyberspace on our own. So unilateralism, no matter how strong we are, is simply not a viable foreign policy strategy. We have got to partner with others. And the challenge with a country like China is: how do we selectively partner with China, given our profound disagreements, the difference between our systems and the fact that we, for example, have real foreign policy differences, say over the fate of Taiwan. And that that to me, is going to be one of the real foreign policy challenges going forward.

MEGHNA: Jack, did you want to respond to that?

BEATTY: Undoubtedly, it is going to be but you know, look at it. I mean, one of the one of the faults, I think of the of the current administration is the President sees things in a zero sum way, you know, we win, they lose even his view of trade, which is, you know, since Adam Smith, we accept that it's, you know, when comparative advantage and all that he sees that as No, I win, you lose, he was talking about the trade deficit with China just yesterday, and he said, Look, they ripped us off. They didn't rip us off. We got all that cheap goods that we wanted from China. That's, that's called trick, he doesn't seem to understand that basic fundamental of, of international economy. And he doesn't seem to, to look at foreign relations that way, either. Although you have to give him a lot of credit for trying to warm relations with North Korea at the top.

MEGHNA: Well, Richard, I wonder: it sounds like you are lamenting the death of a sort of liberal world order that, as you pointed out, the United States has been the beneficiary of and the leader of for the past 75 years. But if you had a magic wand, and you could you could wave it over Planet Earth right now, what would you change? I guess what I'm asking you is what would you do to, to set up the United States of the global community for success, as we come through this pandemic?

HAASS: I would look in two directions. Domestically, I would try to make the case to Americans about why foreign policy was in our national interest, why our involvement in the world would improve the quality of life here at home. At the same time, we would also need to attend to our many challenges and shortcomings here at home. I once wrote a book called Foreign Policy Begins At Home. And the whole idea was we needed to establish a greater domestic base if we were going to be capable of acting in the world and Americans were going to be willing to support it. I also made clear something the President might have missed in the book was the argument that foreign policy doesn't end at home, we've got to stay involved in the world. It's we now circling back to where we began the conversation. We've got to take into account this new global agenda and we've got to we've got to figure out how to narrow the gap between these emerging global challenges, like global health, like climate change, like terrorism, like proliferation, and global arrangements. One of the phrases you constantly hear from people in my businesses international community. Well, the fact is, there isn't one. And our goal should be to better build one where we take into account this newest security agenda. So that's what I would focus on, I wouldn't let go of the old agenda. I'm still worried about Russia, what they're doing in Europe. I'm worried about Iran. I'm worried about North Korea, worried to some extent about China. But I would put much greater emphasis on building global arrangements to deal with this new set of challenges that, as we've seen over the last few months, has the ability to fundamentally turn life here upside down.