“What we’ve learned, also the hard way, is that our respect for sovereignty can’t be absolute.“
Dr. Richard Haass is the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, publisher and educational institution dedicated to being a resource to help people better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.
What went wrong following World War I? The United States embraced isolationism and protection. We rejected the League of Nations and global trade, and from the Depression came the rise of populism and extreme nationalism. By the 1930s, we were back at war despite our best efforts. Fortunately, those in charge of the United States following World War II studied post-WWI decisions. “They were old enough in many cases to have lived through it and were determined not to repeat the mistakes.”
It’s also important to distinguish between populism and nationalism. The former derives from living standards that are drifting or declining, whereas the latter is a response to feeling like people are losing out on trends and identity. As we see with the Presidency of Donald Trump, both are options in the playbook of what a leader can draw upon in response to difficult times.
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SPEAKER
Dr. Richard Haass
President
Council on Foreign Relations
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Anthony Scaramucci: (00:08)
Richard. It's a real honor to have you on with us today. I think you gave amazing presentation at our conference in Abu Dhabi and fortunately we were going to have you in May at our conference, but here we are virtually. And I thought this book was very timely because it came out right around graduation. And I remember hearing you speak about the book and suggesting for people to read the book upon graduation, it would give them a primer on what is going on around the world, but also starting at a spot where people could understand how these world order that we're living in now, and it's obviously changing, but how the world order sort of got constructed.
Anthony Scaramucci: (00:51)
And some people think that we're still fighting the first world war, some people think we're still fighting that in the Middle East and so forth. So I would love to have you start first with your background. I think you have one of the more fascinating American stories where you were raised here in New York, but you went on to become this internationalist and great geopolitical thinker. And then I want to talk about where we are today and how we got there, but tell us a little bit you first.
Dr. Richard Haass: (01:22)
Well, thank you, Anthony, and thank you, John. Great to be back with you. Sorry, it's only that it's virtual rather than in-person. Look I've been really lucky. I've had the kind of career that you can only have in the United States. In most other countries, you pretty much have to decide early on what you're going to do when you grow up. And one of the good things, many good things about this country is that there's flexibility. And I've been able to go in and out of government. So I worked for different presidents and on the outside I've been at various think tanks and universities. Now I'm at the Council on Foreign Relations. So in that sense, it's been incredibly interesting.
Dr. Richard Haass: (02:08)
I got into this field really for two reasons. One is when I came of age, Vietnam was a big debate in the '60s. I was too young for civil rights to be the formative debate so I got interested in the world. And what really led me in this direction, I was a head of professor of religion at Oberlin. When I got to campus in '69, I said, " Who's the best professor?" People said, " It's professor Frank." And I said, "Okay, what does he teach?" And they said, " New Testament." And I said, "Well, that's interesting. That's not the one we read in our house, but I'm willing to try it."
Dr. Richard Haass: (02:39)
I did, as you know, a good teacher can make any subject fantastic. He was a great teacher. I got involved from there, I spend time in the Middle East and so forth. And one thing led to another led to another. And if there's anyone young watching this, I'd say don't over-plan your life. Just do interesting things. And it'll add up to be an interesting life. And I've been going in and out of government ever since. So when I'm out, my life is two halves. One half is the running of institutions now for nearly 18 years to Council on Foreign Relations. And the other half is essentially putting ideas out into the public conversation. Whether in books, articles, TV, podcasts, Twitter, events like this, what have you. But I just think, right now it's an important time to do these things because there's so many things in play. That it's not a time to sit back. I really do think it's a time to jump in.
Anthony Scaramucci: (03:40)
So tell us why you wrote this book. What was the idea behind it? You've written obviously many different books 2017, The World in Disarray, but this is a different book. This is a book where somebody could pick it up if they landed from Mars, and say, "Okay. What's going on planet earth. And how is the geopolitical system set up? And what are the challenges for the people of earth?" Tell us about that.
Dr. Richard Haass: (04:04)
Well, you're right. All my previous books were books written, how do I put this, for people one way or another kind of like me, people in the foreign policy debate, people who had made this a big interest or even their careers. And it's a kind of insider's debate. Every field has some economists have them, scientists have them. Where you're writing at a level where you can assume a lot of knowledge, assume a lot of background. And you're essentially making arguments. You want to change the thinking of people. This is fundamentally different. I came to the conclusion a few years ago. I guess two things. One is, I'd said a lot of what I had to say, particularly in the Disarray book and some other books, Foreign Policy Begins at Home. And at some point as an academic, you've got to avoid the temptations to rewrite your books. You got to move on.
Dr. Richard Haass: (04:53)
And that also in this country and around the world, you had an extraordinary number of people who simply didn't have the basic knowledge and understanding in order to be an informed citizen. And in that I'm a Jeffersonian. I believe democracy thrives only when its citizens are informed and I hate the idea that people say this November are going to vote for a candidate without having thought hard about the issues or harder about their stances on some of the foreign policy issues. Even though what that person would do, if they're elected, would have tremendous consequences for all of us.
Dr. Richard Haass: (05:27)
And the problem is you can go to Harvard or Stanford or any other elite university, not to mention the non-elite universities and colleges, not to mention high schools and you can graduate essentially illiterate unknowing about the world. These courses either are not offered in high school, or if they're offered in college and university, they're not required. And way, way too many Americans are leaving campus, essentially not equipped to deal with this global world we find ourselves in. Or if you're my age and you may be studied at 40 or 50 years ago, whatever you studied was obsolete. Technology has changed. The Cold War has been over for three decades.
Dr. Richard Haass: (06:07)
If you watch the nightly news, you're not going to pick up much of anything about the world. If you go on the internet, the problem is it's all there, but so is a ton of other stuff that's junk. And there's nobody there to point you to the right sites and say, read this, ignore that. So what I decided to do was to try to write a primmer or the rich call a primer that would essentially be one-stop shopping that would give you the foundation, make you a more informed citizen, help you navigate all that's going on. Hopefully would also lead you to read other books. But even if not, my goal was to kind of bring people to a level where they, again, could be more informed citizens make better decisions politically and personally, and what this is, is a relatively short 300+ page book assumes nothing, explains everything. And the idea is to make an interesting and accessible and hopefully I will have succeeded.
Anthony Scaramucci: (07:02)
Well listen, it's a great narrative as well. And I love reading the book and we were talking before we went on the air live about certain chapters. But when you go back to World War I, in some ways we're still fighting World War I, as you point out and World War I, we got the treaty wrong. Obviously you point that out as well. And the Middle East, the Sykes-Picot Treaty and the evacuation of the Ottoman Empire from the Middle East is still with us today. So what would you say to people about how we got to where we are today and what do we need to do to, I think we would both acknowledge we've had 75 reasonably good years of peace and prosperity as a result of the post World War II architecture. But that is fraying. And obviously President Trump is dismantling parts of it, but take us back World War I, World War II, the architecture and where we are today.
Dr. Richard Haass: (08:03)
I think you set it up exactly right. Now, we came out of World War I, which was meant to be the war to end all wars. And two decades later, the world was back at war. So something went drastically wrong. And what went wrong was the United States embraced isolationism. We rejected the League of Nations. We rejected trade. We embraced protectionism. With the depression, you had the rise of populism and extreme nationalism. Countries weren't serious about security, didn't react to threats when they happen. And like I said, by the late '30s, we were back in a global war and the United States for all of its efforts, couldn't avoid the consequences. Couldn't stay out.
Dr. Richard Haass: (08:52)
So there's lots of lessons in this. There's lots of lessons about the falling isolationism. There's the lessons that like it or not, the world matters. There's the importance of working with others rather than unilaterally. There's the risks of protectionism. We want to both the reasons of wealth, but also to create connections. We want trade to be a vibrant thing. Coming out of World War II, what was so interesting is the people who led the United States after World War II, beginning with President Harry Truman and those around them, they went to school on the lessons of after World War I. They read that stuff. They were old enough in many cases to have lived through it. And they were determined not to repeat the mistakes. So you didn't have a return to isolation.
Dr. Richard Haass: (09:37)
As we did an escape back behind the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. We entered into alliances, including NATO. We built great global institutions, the World Bank, the IMF, the precursor of the World Trade Organization, the UN and so forth. We got the American people to support an American role in the world. You know, Acheson wrote his memoirs under the title Present at the Creation, well, it's not modest, but it's actually accurate. This was a truly indeed the most creative moment in American foreign policy. And we've been riding their wave for 70, 75 years. And as you say, it's framed, a lot of these institutions were never designed for this year. Lots of challenges that we now had didn't exist then. You didn't have climate change. Didn't have cyberspace, North Korea, Iran didn't have any nuclear materials. The world was a couple of billion people. Now it's nearly eight billion people and on and on.
Dr. Richard Haass: (10:36)
So we don't have the institutional basis anymore. I think what's also happened is now a lot of Americans don't see the benefits because they don't know this history or don't see it the same way I do. Don't see the benefits of America's involvement in the world. They only see the cost. They look selectively at the mistakes we've made, the Iraq's or Vietnam's rather than the larger areas where we've got it right. And suddenly once again, we find ourselves in debates where against the backdrop of rising great power rivalry against all these global challenges we have the United States, again, flirting with isolationism, flirting with unilateralism, flirting with protectionism.
Dr. Richard Haass: (11:21)
So I'm not saying a war is inevitable. I'm not saying we're at 1936 now. I'm not making that argument, but there are certain echoes. Mark Twain's line history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. There's some rhyming about the post-World War I era, and we need to take its lessons to heart because good things just don't happen. Peace and order don't just happen because they're inevitable or they're the natural way of things. To the contrary, they're the unnatural way of things. And if we want peace and prosperity to happen, we have to work hard with others to make them happen.
Anthony Scaramucci: (11:55)
I mean, one of the points that I've heard you make on television, you make it on Twitter, you lace it into the book. And I think it's in quote. I want to get your reaction to this. See, the precursor to the World Trade Organization was the General Agreements of Trade and Tariffs. And when that was designed, there was a coordinated effort by the State Department and Treasury and more or less a bipartisan effort to make those straight deals uneven. United States being the last industrial superpower of existing capitalist superpower after World War II, we wanted to have a burgeoning middle class and rising living standards around the world.
Anthony Scaramucci: (12:32)
I saw your interview with, I think it was Dr. Steele who wrote the Marshall Plan at the Council Foreign Relations. It was a brilliant book about us rebuilding infrastructure outside the United States to shore up prosperity around the world, to not only protect it from communism, but also to create a flourishing, a dynamic market for people. And that unevenness caught up to us a little bit. President Trump obviously has challenged that unevenness. So let's say you were the foreign policies are, let's say you were present at a new creation and you had Dean Atkinson's role today. What type of infrastructure architecture would you discard that you think is obsolete? And what type of things would you build for the world that you think would help us into the 21st Century?
Dr. Richard Haass: (13:26)
There's a zillion things I could say, but let me focus on two. One is I would probably think about architectures in the plural rather than the singular one. There's not going to be a UN or anything else that's going to solve or manage our problems for us. Instead, we're going to have to think about separate arrangements for separate challenges. Might be different, not might be, will be your needs to be different participants. So for example, if you're worried about climate change, you might say let's bring the most important, significant industrial countries into this. We don't need 190 countries. We can probably get by with 15. So we'll do it with them and we'll set up an arrangement there that would encourage certain types of behaviors. In cyber, I would say we would begin with the more open societies, because we're more likely to have something in common about what the rules of the road ought to be.
Dr. Richard Haass: (14:20)
We've done certain things, I would say Iran or North Korea. And that way we bring together a handful of countries to provide negotiating forum. So what I would have is a kind of designer multi-lateralism. And in some cases, by the way, if say I was going to deal with global health, Anthony, I would have maybe the Gates Foundation, some of the big pharma companies. I don't think you should limit yourself to countries. If you're dealing with cyberspace, you'd want to have Google and Facebook and Apple and Twitter in the room.
Dr. Richard Haass: (14:52)
So one would be, I'd spend a lot of time designing a new set of architectures that would be multilateral and would be in each case, bring together those who are willing, able, relevant to deal with the challenge. So that'd be one thing I would do, but it would need to be a creative situation led by the United States, working with others, that'd be one thing. The other is, and this goes back even further in history, you talking about World War I, going back to the rise of the modern era. It's actually the 17th century. The rise of the idea of sovereignty of sovereign states, respecting one another's borders, not changing them by force. I think that's still important.
Dr. Richard Haass: (15:34)
We learned the hard way once Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait 30 years ago, when Russia went into Ukraine. We need respect for borders. We don't want to live in a world of mayhem. And even now we want to have respect for borders also against cyber. What Russia is doing is outrageous and shouldn't be able to get away with that sort of thing. But I would argue that's not enough. What we've learned also the hard way is that our respect for sovereignty can't be absolute. We already acknowledged that with genocide, if a country wants to kill or allow millions of people to be killed within their borders, I don't think sovereignty gives them that right.
Dr. Richard Haass: (16:08)
If a country wants to harbor terrorists within its borders and those terrorists mount attacks against us or anybody else as the Taliban learned after 9/11, sovereignty doesn't protect you. If Brazil wants to destroy the Amazon rainforest, that would have cataclysmic consequences for global efforts against climate change. I don't see why Brazil should have the right, just because the rainforest largely falls on its territory. Countries need to meet certain obligations in dealing with the outbreaks of disease. China didn't, we're all paying a price for it. Just because North Korea wants to have nuclear weapons, I don't believe they should have the right to do it.
Dr. Richard Haass: (16:48)
So what think we need to do is begin the conversation about a world that has a different operating system. And it includes sovereignty, the good parts of it, but it can't be absolute. We need to start to condition sovereignty on responsible obligate behavior on countries meeting certain agreed upon obligations. So those would be the two things I'd emphasize. A new operating system for the world and new institutions to deal with global challenges. The rest of it we know how to deal with. We know how to deal with rising great powers and the rest. We have a playbook for that. But these other two things I think need to be new.
Anthony Scaramucci: (17:25)
Well, I mean, but there's another thing that's unspoken that we, you and I are always talking about, which is the specter of nationalism. And it's the specter of politicians that seize on nationalism rather than being transformative in trying to calm things down. They use that jingoism as a way to gain power. And so there's an issue related to that. We don't have to go into it today. I want to turn it over to questions. Before I get there, though, I saw you on Morning Joe, this morning discussing the incident with China and the situation in Houston with the Chinese Consulate.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:01)
I thought you said something very interesting about you could use a sledgehammer or you could bring a scalpel to a situation like this. And so for people that maybe are not as aware of this issue as you and I are, tell us a little bit about the issue and tell us about what's going on in the China-US relationship and what you're concerned about and what we need to do to improve that relationship.
Dr. Richard Haass: (18:22)
This is for those who slept in this morning, and didn't watch Morning Joe. What China is doing-
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:30)
That's you John Darsie, pay attention. Okay. I know you missed it this morning. Ll right.
John Darsie: (18:32)
I don't have cable. I'm not one of these baby boomers that still has their cable box. I'm a streamer.
Dr. Richard Haass: (18:37)
John was clearly, he was clearly organizing his room. So Room Rater would give him a higher rating. That is how it was.
John Darsie: (18:41)
Exactly right.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:44)
I just have to say, Dr. Haass, I was so happy when you blend with a room that crushed John Darsie. And what I said to Dr. Haass is I gave him an 11 over a Scaramucci, which is an 11 out of 11, John. Okay. So you can take the fake George Washington picture down now. Okay. He's crushed you with the globe and even like the beautiful lighting and everything. But let's go to China and tell us where you think we are and tell us about that issue and how is it going to play out or how would you like to see it play out?
Dr. Richard Haass: (19:16)
China's doing lots of things that we have every right to be strongly opposed to. Whether it's theft of intellectual property, at times using students to do espionage, getting access to American laboratories associated with American universities or the private sector. So there's lots that China is doing here that should give us pause. Obviously same holds for the rest of the world. But closing a consulate is not the response. If I had been in the State Department, I would have said, okay, we would go to the Chinese foreign minister or to their ambassador in Washington and say, "Look, we have the goods on these guys. So you either withdraw them or we're going to kick them out. And we're not going to do this publicly, we're not going to embarrass you, but this is unacceptable behavior."
Dr. Richard Haass: (20:06)
If we have real problems with their students, we would go to the Chinese ambassador or foreign minister and say, "Hey, we're all in favor of your students coming here to study. We're not in favor of your students coming here to do espionage. So we're going to force these students to leave, or we're going to start denying your certain students from China, access to certain types of laboratories and all that because we just don't trust that they're legitimate students. Again, we would do it quietly. We're not out to start a major cycle of action and a reaction of tit for tat."
Dr. Richard Haass: (20:38)
The fact that we didn't do that. We made this public, this guarantees the Chinese are going to shut down at least one of our consulate. We each have a half dozen consulates. So what are they going to do? Shut our consulates, say in Hong Kong? How is that going to help us? How is that going to help us monitor events there? We use other consulates in China to keep an eye not just on China, but on some of its neighbors. How is that going to help us? It's a lot easier for China to have people in the United States, moving about keeping an eye on us than it is us to have Americans in China. We need these consulates.
Dr. Richard Haass: (21:14)
So it seems to me, this is really self-defeating in the narrow sense that we're going to make ourselves a little bit more blind, shall we say. We're not going to fundamentally affect China's ability to monitor what we are doing. And this is going to contribute to the momentum of the breakdown of the most important relationship in this year of history and call me cynical, but it looks to me, this is far more about American politics and the run up to the November election to look, "tough on China" than it is about anything in terms of foreign policy.
Anthony Scaramucci: (21:49)
Right. Let's roll over to John.
John Darsie: (21:50)
So we're going to go to questions, Dr. Haass. You talked about the crumbling of these global supernational organizations and the rise of nationalism, especially in the United States. Is that rise in nationalism and the erosion of that global order, is that a disease that's born out of rising income inequality? Is it disease born out of just the lack of education about history? Is it a disease that's born out of the fact that the greatest generation is dying off? Bob Dole just turned 97 yesterday, and I think it reminded people of sort of an era that's gone. And is Trump a symptom of the disease or is he the disease itself that's causing the crumbling of these organizations?
Dr. Richard Haass: (22:37)
I think to some extent it's useful, John, to distinguish between populism and nationalism. And I think a lot of the populism does derive from a living standards that are either drifting or actually in some cases going down. I think nationalism is something that's also a response at times to a sense of losing out. People aren't comfortable with trends, with their own trajectory and they're looking for other things to grab onto. I think political leaders at times put them out there because they can be popular lame scapegoat immigrants, scapegoat, foreign competition, and so forth.
Dr. Richard Haass: (23:18)
So I think all of these are pretty much in the playbook of responses to difficult times. It's one of the reasons that it's important to have things like growing economies and the rest. I think Donald Trump is both a reflection of this and a driver of it. I think Trumpism, when you think about the context he got elected, it was after Iraq and Afghanistan. The sense that we'd overreached after the 2007/8 economic crisis, the financial crisis. I think it was a general sense of the establishment and elites had let the country down. So people were willing to take a flyer on this outsider. And what I think we're realizing is that bad situations can get worse.
Dr. Richard Haass: (23:57)
And the question is whether we self-correct or not, and we're seeing it around the world. We saw it in Brazil, we're seeing it in Mexico, but we're also seeing on a lot of these places is that whosever is in power is being held to responsible and to account. So when people in power do well and there's challenge, say like Angela Merkel, in Germany, or say the governor of Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo, or the prime minister of New Zealand, their numbers go way up. And when Bolsonaro or Lopez Obrador does bad in Brazil or Mexico respectively, their numbers will go down. The Iranian government is under pressure from below because their performing. Donald Trump's numbers have gone down dramatically because he has performed badly on COVID-19.
Dr. Richard Haass: (24:51)
So I think these things go in waves. I just think the danger now is when the things begin to get out of hand, that countries are that the normal stuff of foreign policy and diplomacy breaks down and that leaders become prisoners either of the nationalism and populism in some ways that brought them to power. And I think particularly in the US-Chinese relationship right now, both countries were paying enormous price from further deterioration in the relationship. But I can't sit here and tell you it's not going to happen. At the moment, the momentum is bad.
John Darsie: (25:24)
You write in the book that climate change may be, and this is a quote, "the defining issue of this century". And you touched on it briefly earlier about how we might be able to tackle that issue in a multinational international type of framework. Do you believe that in the current environment, we're going to be able to marshal a global response? And in your opinion, what exactly should that global response look like to tackle climate change?
Dr. Richard Haass: (25:48)
The reason I think climate change could be that defining is I think the potential of it to change so many dimensions of life on earth are great. Shortages of water, loss of access to arable land. There's a great piece by the way, in today's New York Times, and it's one of those graphics dynamic, and I don't know what they're called interactive, but it talks about the hundreds of millions of people who are likely to be turned into forced migrants because of climate change over the next 50 years. And just think of that. If we have hundreds of millions of people, where are they going to go? What's going to be implications of that not just for human life, for disease, for political stability in the countries they go to? So I think climate change in of itself is really bad and it will set in motion other trends.
Dr. Richard Haass: (26:36)
I think there's two ways to deal with it. And by the way, we've knocked on the right way. So far, we've done what I call the UN General Assembly approach. We try to get everybody together and we try to get them to agree to a formula. And historically, we've now had three formulas. We've had cap and trade, we've had a global carbon tax, and now we have the Paris Approach. Not one has worked at all. And even if the United States were part of Paris it's such an inadequate framework. It not worth the effort really. So I think there's two answers on climate change. One is the top-down approach. And as I said, if United States or in something like TPP, that'd be a great place to start. And you'd basically say, if you want to export to a TPP country, we represent nearly half the world's markets. Great. But if you're using coal to produce something, uh-uh (negative), there's going to be a tariff on it. There's ways to incentivize people to improve their climate performance, things like that.
Dr. Richard Haass: (27:33)
And then I think the other thing is from below the ground up, which is fuels, and I would be putting massive amounts of money into research through the energy department and otherwise. Everything from working on hydrogen as a fuel to renewables and so forth. And to some extent, some of this has happened. We're beginning to see the market, regulatory policy. I would be very demanding of automobiles and trucks, and with so-called cafe standards. In my experience, Detroit responds well so long as they know what the rules are and they know what they're not going to change. They're able to meet demanding guidelines. So I would essentially create a framework where we make tremendous innovation and I would make this a priority for innovation. And then I'd be thinking about when we do have breakthroughs, how we share them with the rest of the world, almost like we did with HIV medications.
Dr. Richard Haass: (28:22)
If we have certain technologies that are major assets in the battle against climate change, we should think about making them globally available. And then we should also create these trade related frameworks for incentivizing countries to, "clean up their acts." And so I would have a two-pronged or three-pronged approach, regulation, innovation, and a different approach to global frameworks. But we better get going on this. This is one of the things, sorry to go on too long,
John Darsie: (28:51)
No problem.
Dr. Richard Haass: (28:51)
This is a really hard issue to deal with because it's a slow motion crisis. And in my experience, governments and particularly democracies don't do well with slow motion crises. A little bit of like a lot of the businessmen and women who are part of us all. We all face the pressure of the urgent crowding out the important. So like right now, for example, we're dealing with PPP and putting people back to work in this country because of a COVID-19 and issues dealing with climate are pushed off. We don't have the luxury of dealing with them, but why wouldn't we marry PPP with climate change? Why couldn't we say, if you're going to get X billions of dollars from the government, you can't use coal or you're going to have to adopt these set of regulatory standards. So I think it's a mistake not to deal with this now, to think we can wait till tomorrow because this is not a good bottle of Bordeaux. It ain't get better if we lay it down for a day, a week, a month, a year or 10 years. The options are only going to get worse.
John Darsie: (29:56)
Another great primer you offer in the book is the idea of why having the US dollar as the global reserve currency is such a powerful weapon for the United States, both from an economic and the State Department uses it as a weapon and pulling lever of powers in certain parts of the world? Could you explain to our audience why that global reserve currency status is so important for the United States?
Dr. Richard Haass: (30:20)
Sure, Valery Giscard d'Estaing became the president of France, when he was their finance minister, the phrase he called, it was it conveyed on us, conferred on us, exorbitant privilege. Essentially means we can do what we need to do in terms of the Fed can do what it needs to do in terms of managing the American economy. And the whole world basically goes, responds to it. It means that if we chalk up debt and we've obviously chalked up a lot of it, it's in dollars. We don't have to worry about changing rates. I mean, imagine if all of our debt were in some other currency and suddenly the dollar weakened against it, our debt would go up by whatever percentage the dollar weekend against it.
Dr. Richard Haass: (31:04)
It means if we do want to introduce certain types of sanctions, the dollar is the mechanism by which we do it. So it gives us tremendous economic and political advantage. The problem is the rest of the world is beginning to grow a little bit uncomfortable with it. One is we've overly weaponized it. Two, we've amassed this enormous debt. Three, we've politicized the Fed to some extent, president's attacks on Jay Powell. Four, our response to COVID-19 has raised questions about our competence. Fifth, the worst thing of relations with allies over trade and with Chinese over everything has made others less willing to live in a dollar-dominated world, plus willing to live with the dollar as a reserve currency in part because it does give us influence and advantage. So I think what we're doing is hastening the emergence, not of an alternative world, but of rivals. And my guess is in a number of years, the dollar won't be nearly as dominant as it is now. And that we will pay a political and economic price because we'll lose some of our advantage, some of our influence.
John Darsie: (32:11)
So we have multiple questions on China. We'll wrap up with this question, then I'm going to aggregate into one. And you touched on US-China relations, but let's envision a scenario whereby Joe Biden wins the election in November. Obviously the tone and the approach that the Trump administration has taken towards China has weakened China economically. And frankly it's weakened the United States economically, to some extent. What do you see as the future direction of US-China relations? What's your view on the risk of military conflict in the South China sea, where tensions are rising? Do you think China might take a little bit more of an appeasement type of approach as it relates to the United States to sort of hit the reset button on relationship with the new administration?
Dr. Richard Haass: (32:54)
It's a good question. I've been thinking about it a lot. My own view is US-Chinese relations are going to be difficult and troubled, regardless of what happens this November. If you look at the people advising Vice President Biden, if anything, they care far more and they've been far more consistent in their concerns about Hong Kong, the regards human rights in China. They have been far more consistent about their concerns about the South China sea. On economics, they've been less preoccupied with the level of American exports to China, the kind of phase one trade deals sort of stuff that's animated the president. So my point is simply I think US-Chinese relations are going to be troubled regardless.
Dr. Richard Haass: (33:39)
I think the problem, probably the difference in a Biden approach is it'll list allies a lot more in Asia and in Europe. And it would be less by Twitter or more by classical diplomacy. And I think that's important. So I think the fundamental differences would be there. No one should kid themselves. This is going to be awfully difficult, but I think the approach might increase the odds that you have a slightly better chance of at least lowering the temperature, but we shouldn't kid ourselves. The differences particularly on trade are profound about everything from intellectual property protection, to the role of the state in the economy. These are fundamental differences to what I can and I said over human rights over China. And China is clearly entering what seems to be a new phase of its foreign policy. China's come a long way since Deng Xiaoping the idea of hiding and biding your time.
Dr. Richard Haass: (34:36)
Well, it's clear to me that Xi Jinping has essentially said, we're done hiding, we're done biding. We're here. The future is now. We're more assertive. Look at it like what they did with India. Look at the South China sea with Vietnam. Look at what they've done in Hong Kong. Look at what they're saying and doing this with Taiwan. So I think we have to begin from the assumption that this is going to be both the most important and in some ways the most challenging relationship we have. And I think it will be difficult and challenging under regardless of what happens this November.
John Darsie: (35:15)
Dr. Haass, we're going to leave it there. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us again. We really enjoyed having you at SALT Abu Dhabi, and we look forward to having you at a future SALT Conference, either in Vegas or elsewhere. But thanks again for doing this.
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:28)
Richard before you go, what is the next book? Have you thought about it yet?
Dr. Richard Haass: (35:33)
First, you're great to ask. I can produce one about every three years since I have a day job at the Council on Foreign Relations. First, I'll produce a paperback for this and a new edition of The World in Disarray. I'll put those out next spring, and then I'll start thinking seriously about the next book. So I need a little...I think when you write books, you kind of go through a cycle of decompression after you finish, you finish it, you go out and promote it. I'll do the forwards to the paperback edition of this one and the last one. And then I'll put my feet up and I don't know about you, but I walk a lot when I think about books. So I'll increase my step count and that'll help me come up with the next book.
Anthony Scaramucci: (36:22)
All right. Well, a terrific rendition of what's going on. I'm going to hold the book up one more time before we say goodbye, a fantastic book. I recommend it to all the college kids that are listening in on this. And Richard, I hope I get a chance to see you in person soon. We get back to Breakfast. You're a great voice in the debate and we loved having you on. Thank you again.
Dr. Richard Haass: (36:42)
Thank you. Thank you, Anthony, thank you, John. Be safe and well all of you.
John Darsie: (36:45)
Take care.
Anthony Scaramucci: (36:45)
Thank you. You too, sir.