Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass: Foreign Policy Challenges Facing Biden Administration “One Hell of an Inbox;” New Approaches to Climate Change and International Trade and Why Understanding Global Issues is More Vital Than Ever

In the latest edition of CERAWeek Conversations, Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, discusses the major themes of his new book The World: A Brief Introduction and applies them to the challenges facing the world at it heads into 2021. He urges society to adopt a mindset that connects the impact of individual and domestic actions on international issues.

In a conversation with Daniel Yergin, vice chairman, IHS Markit (NYSE: INFO), Haass frames the uniqueness of today’s global challenges in a historical context, explores the pushback against globalization, examines U.S.-China relations, the growing divide with Russia, and regional risks posed by Iran, and presents new models for international collaboration on climate change and trade.

The complete video is available at: www.ceraweek.com/conversations

Selected excerpts:
Interview Recorded Tuesday, December 8, 2020

(Edited slightly for brevity only)

• On the major foreign policy challenges for the Biden Administration:
  
  “It’s one hell of an inbox. It begins with a lot of the domestic pressures stemming from COVID-19. We’re not going to have the bandwidth to deal with a lot of the world if we can’t get on top of this virus at home. We may not think of a pandemic as a national security challenge, but it really is.
  
  “You have various manifestations of great power challenge, fundamentally different ones, from Russia and China. Then you’ve got the problem countries – places like North Korea, Iran, Venezuela. And then you’ve got global issues like climate. It’s an extraordinary inbox facing the new administration.”

• On how America’s traditional allies view the United States:
  
  “Many of them, particularly in Europe, to some extent in Asia, are dismayed. Quite honestly, they get up in the morning and they see things and they shake their heads because this is not the United States they knew or thought they knew. Even the election result, which most of our traditional allies welcomed, they are worried not simply over the president’s pushing back, but rather the sense that 70 million Americans voted for someone so outside the general mainstream of American foreign policy of the last 75 years.
  
  “They’re worried what this might portend for the future. A lot of our allies don’t know what’s the norm and what’s the aberration. And is the next four years, which kind of looks like a return to the past, is that something that can be taken for granted going forward? Or just the opposite – is the Biden Administration likely to be a one-term phenomenon and then we return to some version of Trumpism with or without the man? It has injected a great degree of uncertainty. I think you’re going to see a degree of hedging behavior on the part of allies in Europe and Asia.”

• On U.S.-China relations:
  
  “This history of the Cold War doesn’t help us so much with China. It’s a very different kind of challenge than was the Soviet Union because China is so economically powerful and economically integrated. The challenge for American foreign policy is, how do you push back against China where we need to over what they’re doing in the South China Sea or what they might do with Taiwan? How do we push back where it’s warranted, but how do we do so in a way that, one, does not lead to a conflict and, two, doesn’t preclude the possibility of cooperation on climate or North Korea or something like global health where it’s obviously in our interest that the two of us do cooperate. That’s a real challenge for foreign policy.
  
  “It’s so much e