International relations in the COVID-19 era. Could the pandemic usher in a new spirit of global cooperation or harden international distrust?
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, served as the senior Middle East adviser to President George H. W. Bush, director of the Policy Planning Staff under Secretary of State Colin Powell and as the U.S. envoy to both the Cyprus and Northern Ireland peace talks.
"We're at a moment in history where we have both an old agenda for national security and we've got to expand that to take into account this new agenda. The other area where I would take issue with Jack is, yes, we're spending $700 billion on defense, and that's a lot. As a percentage of our gross national product, it's only about half — as large as that number is — it's only about half what we averaged during the Cold War. So I think we've got to keep it in perspective. And we face a situation where we have all sorts of weak states. We have terrorism. We have proliferation threats. We do have a rising China. We do have an alienated Russia", he said.
In his opinion, "The national security agenda that will greet the new president, whether it's Donald Trump or Joe Biden, is going to be enormous. It's going to have old fashioned security threats as well as new fashioned security threats, including the consequences of the pandemic. So I actually think it's not a time to cut the defense budget. What it is, is a time to expand other aspects of national security spending. We ought to be doing much more in development aid. We're going to have to do a lot more in economic support for countries that are coming out of the pandemic. We should be doing much more to deal with climate change and so on and so forth. So it's actually an extraordinarily demanding time. Where again, we have the fusion of an old agenda with the emergence of a new agenda.”
He talks also On American leadership on the world stage. “Foreign policy is about what our diplomats say and do, what our military does. But it's also the example we set at home, the quality of our democracy, the strength of our economy, the response, say, to a pandemic. So they are looking at this United States and a lot of leaders — and I speak to them all the time — are essentially saying, 'We don't recognize this America. This is not the America we thought we knew.' So they're in a very difficult position where now they have to essentially get on without us, but they don't really have the capability".
"There's no one who has the power that we have, the influence that we have. So no one can fill our shoes. So everybody's on their own and no one does better on his or her own than they do, again, in a collective effort where the United States leads. So they're not happy about the situation. They're increasingly reconciled to it. But they very much miss the United States that for decades had helped organize the world to meet a whole range of challenges.” he added.
Hass asked what the coronavirus pandemic has taught us about isolationism.
"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 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? Have we learned the lesson that we can't isolate ourselves from what goes on in the world and do that safely?”, he said.