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| Speaker: | Richard N. Haass, president, Council on Foreign Relations |
|---|---|
| Presider: | Fareed Zakaria, editor, Newsweek International |
May 31, 2005
Council on Foreign Relations
Council on Foreign Relations
New York, N.Y.
FAREED ZAKARIA: Ladies and gentlemen, if we can begin. You all know the Council rules involve punctuality, so I’m going to try and get you out at 7:00, just in time for the book reception/signing so that you have a chance to buy the book. And I know you don’t want to miss that. [Laughter] So it’s a great pleasure to do this for a great person. Richard Haass, of course, needs no introduction in this room. If somebody here doesn’t know who he is, you’re obviously in the wrong place. [Laughter]
But I do want to take a moment to tell you the Council rules have been waived unilaterally because, in this event, we are hoping that you will actually quote Richard. [Laughter] So spread the word: this is entirely on the record. [Laughter] In fact, it’s doubly on the record. You get extra brownie points for quoting. [Laughter] Look, I thought what we’d do is just start with a general conversation, and then move to the questions. And the first thing I’d ask you, Richard, is, you left the administration in a fairly high position and did not do what most people do in these situations, which is to write a juicy kiss-and-tell book. And God knows there were secrets people wanted to know about the policy disputes, et cetera. I mean, you could have given presumably an insider’s view of this blow-by-blow contest. Instead, you chose to write the book you have. Why? [Laughter] I mean, I don’t have to tell you the difference in advance levels that you would’ve, you know—
RICHARD HAASS: Fareed’s just basically asked: Why did I write a boring book [laughter] instead of an interesting book? [Laughter] So I want to thank him for that generous first question. [Laughter]
I’m old-fashioned, I guess, and a lot happens in government. This wasn’t my first time; this was the fourth administration I’ve worked for. I’ve worked for President [Jimmy] Carter in the Pentagon, [President Ronald] Reagan at [the] State [Department], the previous President [George H.W.] Bush at the White House, and now this President Bush, again back at the State Department. And if you’re in the kinds of jobs I’ve been fortunate to be in, you’re exposed to all sorts of things, people say all sorts of things. I just don’t feel comfortable kissing and telling, and it’s just not something that I think is—to some extent, I think the policy-making process depends on a certain integrity and on a certain— that people can say things. And if anyone selectively quotes what his colleagues has said, you can make anyone look good or bad. If you do it at the time, I think you destroy the policy-making process. If you do it afterwards, I just think it’s wrong. And I wouldn’t— you know, I would hope that people wouldn’t do it about me, and I just feel that you don’t do it about them.
I also think that the issues now are too important. And I didn’t want this book dismissed by someone—by people saying, “Oh, he was just settling scores,” or, “He was trying to affect the election.” Indeed, I made the conscious decision not to publish it before the election. I didn’t want people to basically ignore the substance and basically focus in on the motive.
So, I wrote a book, an idea book. The advantage of it, even if it’s boring, it is short. [Laughter] It’s not the Yellow Pages. And—but seriously, I think the issues in American foreign policy now are so important that I didn’t want people to be able to dismiss what I was saying simply because they didn’t like the messenger. And indeed, it would’ve been pretty much the same book had [former presidential candidate, Senator] John Kerry [D-Mass.] been elected. I was writing for the next administration, for the American public at this moment, not to, you know, settle scores with some of my former colleagues.
ZAKARIA: And what is the—what are the issues that you thought were that important? What is the most urgent and sort of essential part of the book that you think made it really vital to write now?
HAASS: What made me want to write the book and get up even earlier in the morning than I want to is, as the title suggests, that I do think there is an opportunity— a remarkable opportunity, an unprecedented one, I believe historically— where the United States and the other major powers, rather than devote the bulk of their calories and the bulk of their resources and energies to doing what great powers normally do, which is essentially compete or go to war, but I actually believe that there is an opportunity for them not to do that, but instead to harness their energies for dealing with the real challenges of this moment, which is not one another. Let’s travel the dark side of globalization, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, of nuclear weapons, terrorism, genocide, protectionism, global climate change, you name it, that there’s this remarkable opportunity that in part reflects American power.
One of the reasons that great power conflict is so remote is that if you’re another great power, the United States is so strong—there's such an imbalance of power, it’s not terribly tempting to take us on—but also because what the United States is promoting in the world or ought to be promoting in the world is not narrowly American. I don’t think trying to stop the spread of nuclear weapons or stop people in Darfur from dying or beat back protectionism or beat al Qaeda—I don’t think those are somehow good only for us and bad for China or India or Europe or Japan or Russia.
So the fact that we’re strong, the chances of war are remote. We’ve got this agenda which is not a selfish agenda. Therefore, we can, to use my favorite word, “integrate” the world. And by integrate the world, essentially I mean putting in the other major powers, integrate them, make the world a more unified place, lash it up to deal with these challenges; bring in the have-nots, integrate them.
The fact that we can do this, I think, is an important moment in history. It won’t last; it’s a moment. And what made me write the book is not simply my reading of the upside, but my fear, to put it bluntly, that we’re blowing it, that we’re squandering it; that, by what we’re doing, how we’re doing it—and this goes back now 15 years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall—we are beginning to alienate a big chunk of the world. So now at best they’re sitting on their hands, at worst one day they’ll start to frustrate us.
And secondly, we are eroding the foundations of American power, the very foundations which were responsible, in large part, for this opportunity being here; that, by our fiscal policy, our—where we’re going with competitiveness, our energy policy, the cost of the Iraq war—you add all these things up and my concern is this remarkable, historical possibility is about to be wasted. And if that’s the case—and if you have young children, so do I—my hunch is they and other members of their generation will look back on this and say, “What were these people thinking? They were dealt as good a hand of cards as has ever been dealt and they misplayed it.”
You know, at the risk of being more modest than I normally am—if possible, some of you would say—I tried to write a book of ideas on the belief that ideas matter. If you look at a lot of what’s debated in this country now, it is idea-driven. So I wanted to put out some ideas to basically say there’s a remarkable upside, but the trajectory we were on threatens to squander it.
ZAKARIA: Let me ask you about that central premise, which is the idea that there is this opportunity and there is the possibility of creating this kind of global compact or global concordance. What some people will say is you look around the world, this seems to be a projection of a very American, idealistic world view. A lot of people have criticized you for being a realist, and let me now criticize you for being an idealist. [Laughter]
When I watch the Chinese view of their strategic interests and what they would need to do, or even the Japanese, or even the French, or even the Russians— with the exception of Britain, it is very difficult to find another great power that is thinking in global terms; that is, trying to think about these common global problems. Mostly, there’s a great deal of self-interest, often masquerading as globalism; you know, I mean, certain other countries that are on the continent of Europe. So is there really this possibility?
HAASS: There is, but not because people have suddenly discovered the lyrics to “Kumbaya.” [Laughter] There is, because a lot, again, of what we’re promoting is good for them. Look at the progress the world’s made since 9/11 in integrating itself to deal with terrorism. If you’re a terrorist, your work environment, so to speak, has deteriorated over the last three-and-a-half years. It’s tougher to be a terrorist because of intelligence cooperation, law-enforcement cooperation, homeland-security cooperation. That is a successful example of integration with the trade. Despite the imperfections, shall we say, in the WTO [World Trade Organization] system, that’s an impressive global arrangement where countries voluntarily cede some of their sovereignty because they themselves benefit from participating in a world-based system.
The challenge, I would say, is to try to spread this kind of cooperation in other areas, to deal so with the North Korean or Iranian nuclear challenge, to deal with Darfur, to deal with global climate change after 2012 when the Kyoto Protocol [on climate change] expires.
So ambitious, maybe idealistic? I don’t know; I’ve been called worse. But there’s other moments in history where I think countries played by the rules. I mean, I talk about the early 19th century, when there were elements of great-power cooperation. Even during the Cold War, as you know better than anybody, there are elements where countries didn’t always maximize what they could because they understood the cost of so doing.
But it’s important that we come up with policies that others clearly see as consistent with their interests. It means we do it with them, not to them. I think how you go about this—the consultative process—actually matters. We’re never going to have universal buy-in. We’re not talking about some kind of global government. But I do think we can build multilateral arrangements in each of these areas, and what will vary is how broad the participation is and how meaningful the commitments are.
But I don’t think that what I’m saying is actually—there’s nothing radical about this. I actually think there’s elements of integration in virtually every domain of international activity. I mentioned trade and terrorism; obviously nonproliferation—the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty], other roles.
ZAKARIA: Let’s talk about nonproliferation.
HAASS: OK.
ZAKARIA: Because here you have a situation where there’s been a month-long meeting on nonproliferation. Basically, it has gone nowhere, and it has gone nowhere largely because the United States is refusing to be the active motor of nonproliferation, which is, at the end of the day, the only reason nonproliferation has worked to the extent it has—that hasn’t been the rule, that has been the engine of American power doling out rewards and punishments. What the administration’s view seems to be is that they would much rather work on things like what the—the PSI, the Proliferation Security Initiative. This is basically an ad hoc arrangement, about 40-odd countries, that have agreed to stop—to interdict what seem to be fissile material and nuclear technology in some form or the other. But the administration does not, for some reason, want to take this to the NPT regime, the broader international group.
And it’s a—I bring it up, even though it’s a technical issue, because it’s an interesting division between two approaches. One of which is to say, “Look, we’re going to do this ad hoc, we’re going to do,” to use a phrase that you’ve coined which is now commonly used, “coalitions of the willing. We’re not going to go through some U.N.-led mechanism with the secretariat.” And the reason to do that is yes, it’s global, it’s more institutional. But it’ll be dysfunctional, it’ll be bureaucratic, and lots of people will have vetoes. So is that OK, or do you want to go for the gold?
HAASS: You don’t necessarily want to choose. It’s not a question of one or the other. I mean, in the Olympics you’re happy to win the gold medal and the bronze medal, and we should be willing to go for both. The Proliferation—the PSI—the Proliferation Security Initiative—is an ad hoc arrangement, as you say, Fareed. But it only has an impact, from what I can tell, at the margins, because you rarely get the intelligence you need. You can’t always act on it in a timely way, because you have to know that someone’s doing a clandestine shipment somewhere, you have to be able to do something about it. That’s—much better, it seems to me, to affect the basic policies of governments in the first place to deal with situations—to give you the means to deal, say, with the fuel cycle. I mean, we would be much better off if you didn’t have clandestine shipments in the first place; if you could, for example, come up with a global arrangement where the Irans of the world would not have control over the enrichment process, they wouldn’t have access to enriched uranium. Things like that I can only get through more formal arrangements.
Now, if you can’t get formal arrangements on, I mean, [inaudible] was falling back on something less. The reason I came up with [the term] coalitions of the willing about a decade ago was an idea which simply developed from this post-Cold War world. I feared things were so fluid, and we didn’t have the kind of fixed constellations that you had during the Cold War—I thought we would have to, at least for a transition period, fall back on coalitions of the willing, ad hockery, to deal with these new situations. But it was never the best of all worlds; it was simply the least bad or, at times, the only available alternative.
So my view is where we can lock in more formal arrangements, where we can lock in broader participation, you get all the advantages of predictability, of deterrence, of intelligence-sharing, of economies of scale and joint effort—far, far superior to ad hockery. But where you have to act in an ad hoc basis as a supplement or complement, so be it.
ZAKARIA: And you say the big—the real goal here is affecting the basic policy of nuclear—potential nuclear states.
Now the sexiest part of your book—if I may use that phrase since you claimed that I thought it was uninteresting, [laughter] the most interesting part of the book and the subject of a really important and very, very interesting article in the next issue of Foreign Affairs is an argument you make against regime change, basically. You argue that if you look at North Korea and Iran—and I think I’m exaggerating slightly—but that this entire obsession with demonizing them, with not dealing with them, not touching them with a 10-foot [inaudible] pole, has yielded very little in terms of practical security for either the United States or the world, and that basically we should be about doing an entirely different approach, which is actually actively negotiating with them, normalizing relations if that is part of the package. It’s an entirely different approach than we’ve taken really for 20 years to countries like Iran, North Korea, and I would extend it to Cuba, Burma.
This is, to my mind, a very, very interesting, important policy issue, where very little new thinking has taken place. And we have had a policy of regime change for Cuba, for example, in place since 1959. Castro is today the longest-lived head of state in the world. You would think that there was some— you would realize there’s some problem with the policy, that there is some prima facie evidence that it isn’t working.
HAASS: Well, give it time. [Laughter] Well, at least they already give policies a reasonable period of time.
ZAKARIA: Now explain why—explain what you think—you know, expand on this a little bit.
HAASS: Sure. In my view, the administration has not been willing to put forward a serious diplomatic offer to either Iran or North Korea because of the mistake in judgment; that both countries were somehow close to the precipice—both governments, rather, were somehow close to the precipice of falling, and that any form of diplomatic involvement or engagement would somehow throw them a lifeline. And it was seen as immoral or just counterproductive; that the problem of their proliferation would go away when the governments went away.
The problem with this policy is that, in my point of view, that it’s unlikely to be borne out by events. But even if I’m wrong, no policy-maker can count on the fact that it will be borne out by events. So it ends up, to me, being less of a strategy than a wish. And what we’ve seen in both cases—particularly in North Korea’s, but also in Iran—is objectively, the situation over the last four, four-and-a-half years has grown worse. The United States now faces a far worse challenge from both North Korea and Iran than it did four-and-a-half years ago.
I can only think of three other options if, like me, you believe that regime change simply can’t be counted on. One is to go to war. And the problem is that the military options don’t look terribly attractive, plus both North Korea and Iran have a whole range of retaliatory options. Another option is to live with it. And the problem of living with it, which is what increasingly we’re doing, is what they may do with it. And North Korea, from what I can see, has been willing to sell everything else it has gotten its hands on. Unless you think that the North Koreans have suddenly developed a case of scruples, it’s quite possible they will see plutonium or uranium as something to export for the right price, or Iran might give it away to the right terrorist group if it served their interest.
So I look at these options as basically hoping for regime change, but I don’t see it in any way likely; using military force is unattractive; living with it is unattractive. So my view is, why don’t we give diplomacy a chance? And that means specifying what we require; specifying what we would be prepared to provide politically, economically, security assurances; and specifying what the penalties that would occur to North Korea and Iran if they didn’t meet what we—by we I mean the United States and others—would require.
I mean, diplomats make a big fuss all the time about creative ambiguity. This is a time for creative specificity. We should make it very clear, negotiate with the Japans, Chinas, and others vis-a-vis North Korea, negotiate with the Europeans, the Russians, possibly the Chinese vis-a-vis Iran, and try to come up with a reasonable package. That would include, in my view, also direct talks. I have no problem with that. To me, negotiations are simply a means to an end.
But I can’t guarantee this will work, and for all I know, diplomacy will fail, but it’s the least bad of the options. And if it does fail, then at least you know, OK, it’s not available. And then you can, with a cleaner or clearer mind and conscience, consider the other three alternatives of either living with it or potentially the use of military force or some dramatic effort to try to push over a regime, which again is a long shot.
But it would take a very difficult—it’s essentially—to come back to my idea in the book, we’d essentially say to ourselves a policy of isolation has failed, and what we want to do is realize our goals through integration. In this case, take these pariahs and try to bring them in and get—not unconditionally, but make a deal with them; essentially say, “We’ll integrate you and we will give you the benefits of participation in international society and the international economy, but for a price. And you’ve got to give up control over nuclear materials or terrorism.” That, to me, is a deal worth making.
Now, you know Washington better than I do. I’m guessing that the idea of integrating Iran and North Korea into the world is not probably one of the changes that is going to make the Congressional Republicans sing with joy. It’s not going to make some of your colleagues in the Defense Department sing with joy. Sure it won’t, and that’s why our policy is the way it is. But right now, we have a far worse outcome. You know, whatever discomfort they may get from the policy of diplomacy, I would think would pale in comparison to a policy of waking up to a North Korea that has a dozen nuclear weapons, or to an Iran that starts enriching uranium and we’re not sure whether they weaponized it or not.
So foreign policy is about choices, and we’ve now allowed things to drift to where there’s no good choices. So we can sit there in all purity and say, “We’re not going to deal with these immoral regimes,” and that’s fine—except then you think about the consequences of not dealing with them. And that is what our policy is. We have basically—our policy is the default option of living with these countries becoming nuclear weapons [states], despite the fact that we constantly say that’s an unacceptable outcome. But the default option is drift, and that has become our policy.
ZAKARIA: Let me ask you one more question before turning it over to the audience. You’ve come out of the closet finally on the fact that you opposed the Iraq war.
HAASS: Way to pitch the statement! [Laughter]
ZAKARIA: You opposed the Iraq war. And what you described both in the book and in interviews, in the debate that never really took place in the administration, you are at the very least very cautious about the idea, and very insistent that we should exhaust other options. How do you feel today? How bad, how good do you think it is? What is your read on what Iraq has done to American foreign policy?
HAASS: It’s true, as you say: I opposed the war, though it was often hard to oppose the war simply because there wasn’t a clear decision-making process to weigh in on. But the reason I opposed it was, I didn’t think—and by the way, this was not a preemptive war; it was a preventive war. There was nothing imminent about what the Iraqis were up to. I simply didn’t think it was necessary. I thought we did have other options. And more important, I feared that the costs of going to war were going to be large. Unlike my colleagues, I essentially thought—well, the difference between, I guess, them and me is a better way to put it—is that they were exaggerating the benefits. And more important, I thought they were dramatically underestimating the direct and indirect costs of going to war. And alas, on this occasion, I think I’ve been more right than they were.
ZAKARIA: Why didn’t you resign?
HAASS: You resign in government, in my view, when you’re confronted with something of enormous import and you fundamentally disagree with it, and I would call that a 90-10 decision. And that wasn’t my call on Iraq. I was about 60-40 against. And that was based, though, on the, quote, assumption, unquote, that the Iraqis had chemical and biological weapons. So based on the idea that they had chemical and biological weapons, but not nuclear weapons and were not involved in 9/11, I thought that, you know, I understood the arguments for going to war. We didn’t want these guys to have a technical and biological arsenal. Who knew what they might do with it? But I simply thought that we could live with it, we could contain it, there were other options we could do to tighten up sanctions. And that, again, I simply felt the cost—
Again, foreign policy, it’s like running a business. You’ve got to deal with both sides of the balance sheet. So of course, there would be benefits from getting rid of Saddam and getting rid of whatever biological and chemical weapons they might have. But that’s like running a business and only looking at the revenue side. What about the geopolitical burn rate, if you will?
In this case, I thought it was going to be extraordinarily expensive in terms of money, in terms of lives, in terms of the impact on our military, and in terms of the time it will take from policy-makers. The expression was often used when we talked about it, was we feared it would take all the oxygen out of the room of American foreign politics, that there would be very little oxygen left for doing other things, which gets you, then, into what economists would call the opportunity costs, the indirect costs. It wasn’t simply that you used up all these resources. It wasn’t simply that it would alienate a lot of the world to make them much more concerned about American power. But I worried about the distraction element, what then couldn’t we do?
And I think we’ve seen that. It’s taken a lot of time. But we don’t have anything like the leverage we would have against an Iran or North Korea. They see us tied down where we are. They can count divisions as well as you can or I can. They can count, you know, the votes. They can look at the American people, and they can look at recruitment rates. So my concern is that this would absorb a great deal of our power. And coming back to the ideas of the book, is that it would very much challenge the two basic premises of the opportunity: it would alienate a big chunk of the world, and it would eat away at the sources of American power. And I simply didn’t think it was worth it then, and alas, I think now it is even less worth it.
Again, I say this not knowing what’s going to happen in Iraq. I still think Iraq could go either way. I don’t really know how it’s going to play out. Indeed, it could go not so much either way, but both ways simultaneously. A likely future for Iraq is, there’s some good, there’s some bad, simultaneously; indeed, what we have now. So in two years or three years, my hunch is you won’t have an Iraq that easily can be described as being simply great or awful. Most likely, parts of the country will be pretty good, parts of the country will be pretty bad; again, like it is today. So I don’t think we’re going to have a clear outcome. It’s much more likely to be messy; a version, if you will, of Afghanistan. So from my point of view, was it worth it? No. I think it has distorted American foreign policy, and essentially cost more than it has delivered.
ZAKARIA: All right, ladies and gentlemen. Real questions, briefer is better. Just wait for a microphone.
QUESTIONER: John Hirsch, IPA [International Peace Academy]. Thank you very much, Richard. I wonder if you could say something about your thoughts on strategy for changing any of these policies that you regard as either misguided or incorrect? It seems to me there’s almost no sacrifice in America today except those who are in Iraq and their families. There’s no demand on anybody. There’s a lot of—sort of a sense that everything is reasonably all right. You don’t get a groundswell of opposition from the Democratic Party. What is it that would bring about change in any of these policy prescriptions that you have?
HAASS: Well, two things, John. One that history suggests, is change to policy comes when the American people push back, and the American people push back when the direct cost to them of policies gets too high. We see it in the trade debate, when fairly or unfairly, accurately or inaccurately, Americans push back when they think that imports are unfairly undermining or threatening their jobs. We saw it in Vietnam after a while, when the costs of conducting the war simply got too high. So we haven’t reached that point; one hopes we never will in the case of Iraq. But it’s possible, at some point, the American people will push back against what they see as the direct cost of some foreign policy. That’s one way you get change.
The other way you get change—in a way—in some ways, I’m more interested in—is through ideas. Deconstruct every debate going on in the United States at the moment and at the bottom of it you’ll find an idea. You may think that what the president’s doing on Social Security is great, you may think it’s awful, but unpack it and there are ideas about Social Security privatization, so forth. You know, debates about right to life, unpack it, about ideas: theology, political ideas, whatever. What I’ve tried to do is put forward some ideas here, and one that I think is hopefully a fairly big idea, which is a new construct for American policy, a new doctrine called integration—essentially saying containment was fine for the Cold War, here’s a different approach. Here’s an approach that would help us deal with other major powers, that would help us deal with the pariahs, that would help us deal with the have-nots of the world, the billions of people living on less than $2 a day. So here’s a very different way of doing about American foreign policy. If I’m successful, these ideas will find some traction, and that’s the other way you change policy in this country.
ZAKARIA: In the back there, the lady. Just wait for the mike if you would. And if you could stand and identify yourself? I’m sorry; I forgot the—
QUESTIONER: Hi, I’m Moushumi Khan, a lawyer in New York. I actually have two quick questions. One is that you spoke a lot about—and I apologize; I haven’t read the book—but you speak about—
HAASS: It’s available outside.
QUESTIONER: I will make sure to get it. You speak about foreign policy, but I was hoping you could shed some light on domestic policy in the U.S. and how America has an opportunity to go either way. And what I mean by that, is that you stated that history may judge America, and I believe Americans will judge America, based on our civil-rights policies, based on some other things that are happening, like increased religion in society. Can you—could shed some light on that?
And No. 2 is, the Council had a recent report on anti-Americanism in the Muslim world, and I really wanted to get your ideas on how—what diplomatic initiatives or what ideas you have on changing some of those sentiments in that part of the world.
ZAKARIA: Richard, can I just suggest take the second one, and we’ll come back to the first if we have time, unless you can do them both quickly. Just—I want to make sure everyone gets—
HAASS: I’ll do the first one very quickly. I don’t have a lot of wisdom on that other than to say what happens here at home does have an impact on our foreign policy. It’s extraordinary now when you travel. You travel even more than I do because of global media. People around the world have the amazing window into what’s going on in American society. I mean, you travel and you get an earful about Michael Jackson or about the Terri Schiavo case, whatever. What happens here is not simply our domestic politics. Unlike Las Vegas, what happens here doesn’t stay here. And so in globalization, we have to be aware of the fact that our domestic policy is also our foreign policy.
ZAKARIA: They’re not watching Fox [News] out there. [Laughter]
HAASS: So the perceived flaws in our society clearly have an impact on our ability to preach. So we have things like we had several years ago in Florida, with the [2000 presidential] elections. That does not make it easier for us to tell people about democracy. Or things—how people look at [the U.S. detention center at] Guantanamo or other issues, or other imperfections in our society or our policy and say, “Well, who are you to say this about us?” It’s connected. We can’t compartmentalize the world. If we ever—
Good. The question about the Muslim attitude, anti-Americanism and so forth, I think anti-Americanism comes from three things. One is the fact that we’re stronger, and strength and inequality breed resentment. There is not a lot we can do about that except become weaker, and I wouldn’t recommend it.
Secondly, it’s from how we comport ourselves. I mean, let me tell you something. I actually think how you go about foreign policy, if you do have to say no, well, say then what it is you do support. Don’t simply say you’re against the International Criminal Court or Kyoto; say what it is you do support. Say why it is you’re against it, and say it in a fairly diplomatic way. And essentially, diplomacy. Diplomacy counts. And there’s ways that I believe, over the last four-and-a-half years, we were somewhat gratuitous in the way we confronted the world. I’m all in favor of making enemies if it’s a conscious policy, but don’t make it gratuitously. Don’t do it as a throwaway. Be very conscious of the tone and style of your foreign policy. And by the way, I see some improvements in this. I think the second term we’re already seeing some improvements, the trips to Europe and so forth.
Thirdly, though, the lion’s share of how we are perceived is simply the substance of our policies. It’s what we’re doing. And so, what we’re doing in Iraq, what we’re doing with the Palestinian issue, what we’re doing with Guantanamo, these are the kinds of issues that affect the way the United States is perceived.
The corollary to this is that, while public diplomacy is useful, no amount of public diplomacy can be something of a panacea. Public diplomacy sandpapers off the edges, but it’s not the basic construction. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. So, as talented as [Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy] Karen Hughes is, she can’t turn this around. What it’s going to take is our policy.
Now, the purpose of American foreign policy is not to be popular. And I’m not sitting here suggesting that we should do polls around the world and carry out a foreign policy that simply meets with the world’s delight. That’s not what we’re doing. On the other hand, to the extent that the unhappiness of others has an impact on what it is we’re trying to do, that’s something we need to take into account. And that becomes one factor when we weigh [in on what] our policy should be.
ZAKARIA: Right at the back.
QUESTIONER: I’m Randall Fort with Goldman Sachs. Richard, I have not read your book, either, so I don’t know what you have to say about what is clearly one of the strategic objectives of this administration, and one which they put a lot of investment, so to speak, in, which is democracy in the Middle East. We’ve had an election in Baghdad, first time ever in the history of the Arab world, a reasonably free election. And we’ve seen the tectonic plates shifting in places like Egypt, certainly in Lebanon.
Do you find that not to be convincing or compelling as a strategic objective? Or do you not think that worthwhile? Or how do you assess that particular investment objective of the administration and its prospects for success?
HAASS: I think it’s important. Indeed, I was the person in the administration who, for a while, was put in charge of this after 9/11, and eventually made, I think, the first speech in the administration about the idea that, essentially, the domestic policy in the Arab world now needed to become part of our foreign policy. And that was the lesson that I and others took from 9/11, that, to put it bluntly, that when the president of the United States met one of his Middle Eastern counterparts, they couldn’t spend the entire meeting talking about Palestinians, Iraqis, Iranians, and oil. They had to spend part of the time talking about what was going on in that president’s or prime minister’s or king’s society.
So I believe that’s an important part of our policy. I think, over time, that’s one of the ways—if we can promote reform in these societies—political, educational, cultural, social reform—it’s one of the ways where hopefully young men and women will choose alternative career paths than terrorism. They will see other avenues; they’ll have reasons to live their lives rather than end them in some kind of a suicide attack.
So, I think it’s an important dimension of policy. Obviously, going about it is easier said than done. History is somewhat—what’s the word? It urges caution. Good intentions are not enough. We’ve got to be smart in how we go about it. It involves some very tricky questions of sequencing various kinds of reform, pace of reform, public versus private, encouragement of reform. Something I feel strongly about is that we should not, in any way, confuse elections with democracy. Much more important is to help promote the rule of law and constitutionalism and checks and balances. And once that context is there, then one has elections.
So again, with all those caveats, my view is yes, this has got to become an important part of American policy towards the Arab world. And more generally, I think the United States needs to have this component of its policy. Where I’d probably part ways with the administration is the emphasis they’re putting on it. I don’t believe we can do too much too soon in the Middle East, and in places like Russia, China, and the rest. While again, this must be a component of the policy, we don’t have the luxury of allowing it to crowd out other components of the policy. Quite bluntly, we may need Russian or Chinese help on some pressing geopolitical problem like the Iranian nuclear or North Korean nuclear program. That may mean that we have to put some of these concerns somewhat on the back burner. That is not an all-or-nothing question; it’s a question of emphasis or proportion. And I think we just simply need to be careful, again, as we conduct our foreign policy that we don’t let the democratization element crowd out the others.
QUESTIONER: Do you think Iraq—pushing on Iraq furthered this democratization agenda?
HAASS: I don’t understand that.
QUESTIONER: Do you think invading Iraq and holding the first elections dramatically furthered this agenda?
HAASS: I think it helped it somewhat. There are so many other things, also, from the Arab Human Development Report to, in Lebanon, the assassination of [former Prime Minister Rafik] Hariri, to the death of [former Palestinian Authority President Yasir] Arafat and what that meant for the Palestinians, to Afghan elections, what happened there, the Ukraine elections, what happened there.
I largely think the Iraqi elections had an impact on Iraq, and we’ll see just how much. I do think it had some—you know, I made two trips—three trips to the region in the last seven or eight months, and clearly it had impact on some of the other countries. Indeed, one of the more ironic conversations I had over lunch one day—I think it was Bahrain—recently, where I was listening to two gentlemen talk about what was going on, and they said— one said to the other, “Did you ever think we’d live to see the day where the two most open societies in our part of the world, one is occupied by Americans, one is occupied by Israelis?” Even they were shaking their heads at the irony. So clearly, because of Arab media and the rest, the elections in Iraq did have some impact beyond the borders, and I think that’s healthy. Does it change my basic assessment about Iraq? No. But do I think it had some positive spillover? Yeah.
ZAKARIA: Gary Rosen.
QUESTIONER: Hi, I’m Gary Rosen from Commentary magazine. It seems like an implication of your view on the war that today Saddam Hussein would still be president of Iraq, presumably. So what would our policy toward Iraq look like today in terms of containment, especially knowing what we do now about French and Russian complicity with the undermining of oil-for-food, with the diplomatic difficulties of maintaining sanctions, the problems of keeping a large troop presence in Saudi Arabia, and so forth?
HAASS: You’re right. To be intellectually honest, if you think the war was ill advised, you then have to be prepared for the fact that Saddam Hussein would still likely be in power. Fair enough. If you look at the studies into the sanctions against Iraq, it turns out—I think my statistics are pretty close—that about 85 [percent] to 86 percent of the revenues that accrued to Iraq were caught up in the oil-for-food program. And all the mischief, the scandal and the rest, whether it was through the U.N. or some of the other countries you mentioned, it was only around 14 percent.
So to my mind, the real problem—it’s almost like [Los Angeles Times editorial page editor] Michael Kinsley’s law: what’s truly scandalous in Washington is not what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal. Well, what was truly scandalous about the Iraq policy was not the 14 percent that everyone’s focusing on; it’s the 85 [percent], 86 percent that was business as usual. And there, we should have cut things down. We should have stopped the oil trade with Jordan. We should have stopped the trade with Turkey. We should have stopped the pipeline to Syria. We could have done all these things. We could have done it through some combination of military force, covert action, and economic aid. And the costs of that would probably have been somewhere between— you know, a couple of billion dollars a year, which pales in comparison to what it is we’re spending now.
So, for a policy of, say $2 billion a year, we could have shut down 85 percent of the revenues that were reaching that regime, because this was all stuff we were looking the other way on. And so yeah, Saddam Hussein would probably still be in power, but as it turns out, we now know he wouldn’t have had, to the best of our knowledge, weapons of mass destruction. And I think we could have denied him a lot of his resources, which by the way, he used to help perpetuate his staying in power. To me, would this have been—we also would have had to live with the risk that he could have developed weapons, he could have handed them off. So I’m not saying this is a perfect outcome. I’m just simply saying, given what—the projected costs of a war in Iraq and given all else that we had on our foreign-policy plate, I was willing to take that risk and pay that price, so to speak, of allowing Saddam to stay in power and containing the problem by shoring up, essentially, the international regime.
It never would have been ironclad. There would have been a lot of leakage and all that. But my own view was we could have shut down the bulk of the resources going to him if we had made that a diplomatic priority, and that simply wasn’t something that people were prepared to do.
ZAKARIA: Bill.
QUESTIONER: Bill Luers from the United Nations Association. Richard, I can be your testimonial that you were for this policy toward Iran before you even left government. And I know you’re very consistent in that. I congratulate you on that point of view. It’s an important point. My question is about your integration vision and to what degree does it include an acceptance by the United States on treaties, law, commitments to other nations that implicitly restrict U.S. behavior? My sense is that today, the United States is in a position where it probably doesn’t seem inclined to sign treaties, much less ratify them.
[Senator Richard] Lugar [R-Ind.] said, when he tried to get the Law of the Sea Treaty after 35 years of negotiations to the Senate floor, after having gone through changes that satisfied virtually every U.S. interest, he still couldn’t get it to the floor of the Senate for ratification. And he said, “We may never be able to get another treaty ratified in this country.” Now, to what degree does your vision include an acceptance of the fact that, to play in integration, we have to be willing to accept constraints on U.S. power?
HAASS: We do accept constraints, and what matters is the calculus you make. Again, you enter into constraining treaties all the time on the belief that, on balance, your interests are served. The WTO, the entire international trading regime, is a regime of voluntary restraints. We accept constraints on how we’re allowed to affect potential imports. We accept constraints on what we do vis-a-vis exports. We accept the adjudication powers of a WTO tribunal. So all of those are, to some extent, infringements on our sovereignty, but we accept them because, on balance, we judge that our economic interests are served by being inside the tent rather than outside. Arms-control treaties are constraints. Every time the United States enters an arms-control treaty it constrains itself. But we still abide—
QUESTIONER: [Inaudible]
HAASS: Well, that’s not true. We entered in one several years ago with the Russians, and the United States and Russia both agreed to significantly reduce their inventories.
ZAKARIA: There is something to—other than—there is a kind of schizophrenia, at least in the Republican Party, on the issue of—between economic globalization and all the other forms of globalization, where the WTO is far more intrusive than any one of them. And how does the average American care about what International Criminal Court does, where the WTO will rule in ways that will change his or her daily life? Yet we are willing to accept these very onerous constraints on the economic side, but virtually none on the political.
HAASS: I mean, if you are asking me to explain it, you know, why these issues have become so emotionally and symbolically charged, it’s tough for me to explain it. But I take your basic point, which is twofold. One is, in order to promote what I want, we will have to entertain certain constraints. We do it, for example, on Taiwan policy. We don’t encourage an independent Taiwan. We don’t tell Taiwan, “You’ve got a right of self-determination.” We precisely tell them, “You don’t.” Why? Because we believe, on balance, our interests with China are served by avoiding such action. But we would have to be prepared to accept constraints. And at times, I believe our interests would be served by formally entering into, what do you call, executive agreements or treaties. If we could get some new international agreement that no country could gain independent control of its nuclear-fuel cycle, well, you’d be nuts not to somehow formalize that in some treaty or some other international arrangement. I just think you’ve got to choose these things case by case and judge it on the merits. But I don’t see this as a matter of theology. Maybe some do, but I don’t.
QUESTIONER: My name is [inaudible]. My question is about sharing the burden towards the common good. You mentioned earlier that a lot of objectives are not just American objectives. How can we—well, I mean, in another moment in history, at the end of World War II, we shared the common good by creating multilateral organizations to do a lot of things for American foreign policy. We gave up a priority policy in some cases to subordinate ourselves. How can we better use those types of tools in this moment in history?
HAASS: Well, in some ways that builds on Bill Luers’ question. In some cases, the answer will be treaties. In some cases, it will participation in organizations. I think, to some extent, you’re seeing it.
I mean, NATO is a good example. That’s an organization that was born in one geopolitical era, and over the last 15 years, the United States has helped to adapt to a very different geopolitical era, to the point now where NATO has virtually nothing to do with Europe and you’ve got NATO forces in Afghanistan, you’ve got NATO countries increasingly involved in training Iraqis. And if NATO has a raison d’etre, it’s essentially non-European.
We may have to approach other international or regional institutions and essentially adapt them for some use in a post-polar world. We—post-9/11—or we may need to create new ones. I mean, the PSI in the proliferation area is an example. I just talked about some type of a new international arrangement on safeguards on nuclear fuel. I believe that we really need a new organization to somehow manage geopolitical rivalry in Northeast Asia, which is—unlike Europe, which is somewhat institution-rich, Northeast Asia is relatively institution-poor.
I believe what the U.N. secretary general wrote in his report the other day is exactly right. We need a new international convention that essentially says no end possibly justifies the means of terror. We need to basically come up with that and get states to sign on to it to remove that loophole where they can give support to organizations and they say they’re not terrorists. But if you agree that terrorism is any use of force against innocents for a political goal, then you essentially close that loophole.
So my own view is we have got to selectively look at international rules and international machinery and essentially fill it in, plug holes, use whatever energy you want in order to deal with the challenges of this era, which again are essentially transnational in nature and character.
ZAKARIA: Well again, I think—I guess, Richard, what a number of questions seem to be asking is, is there a political will and a consensus in this country to do it? Or, when you look at the political climate in Washington today and you look particularly how, say, the Republican Party draws its power now from its Southern and Western wings, from what [inaudible] calls the Jacksonian tradition, are you going to see a lot—I mean, it seems like this is a pretty big hill to climb.
HAASS: Except for two things. One is—I’ve now worked for four presidents, and one of the things that always strikes me is how much discretion presidents have. If President Bush wanted to do a lot of what I was saying, he could do it. There’s not a—Congress can’t prevent most of this from happening. He’s exercised tremendous discretion in his presidency: what he did after 9/11, what he did with Iraq, what he’s done or hasn’t done vis-a-vis North Korea, Iran, the Middle East and the Palestinian issue, the emphasis on democracy. Presidents have tremendous latitude in foreign policy. So a lot of what I’m talking about, if tomorrow he woke up and said, “Gee, that guy Haass has one or two good ideas, maybe I’ll run with them,” he could. There’s not a lot there Congress can do to stop him. Sure, they can—you know, they have control to block, you know, appointments and treaties. But then, you know, you can get around a lot of these things with executive agreements other than treaties. Not everything requires dollars. So my own view is presidents have tremendous latitude.
Second of all, presidents have the bully pulpit. Look at what this president has done on Social Security. This is an issue that he said, “I’m going to make one of my priorities coming out of the gate,” probably his cardinal priority coming out of the gate his second term. Imagine he woke up and he said—he looked at the economy, he looked at the world and he said, “Geez, the single thing that would be as much good as anything else for the U.S. economy, for integrating China, for dealing with the poverty of Africa would be a new WTO agreement, a Doha development agreement, and I’m going to make this the principal international economic objective of the next two years.” Imagine what he could do? If he devoted one-third the time he’s devoted to Social Security to negotiating and selling a new global trade round, he could have tremendous impact. So a lot of this is about presidential discretion.
ZAKARIA: And, in fact, he increased foreign aid by 50 percent. And everyone had said it could never happen, and boom, you know, it happened, and nobody cared. In the back.
QUESTIONER: Hi, my name is Kate Kroeger from the American Jewish World Service. And my question is about—at what point should America use its power or presence in terms of intervention when there is a moral and not a strategic imperative? I’m thinking of Darfur, but I’m sure you could use other examples as well.
HAASS: Well sure, it’s become one of the cardinal problems of the post-Cold War world. Indeed, it was, in some ways, the classic challenge of the Clinton era, and you’ve seen it also in this administration with Darfur.
I think we should be doing a lot more. One of the rules I would like to see internalized by the world is this idea that governments don’t have the right to massacre their own people or allow them to be massacred.
One of the ideas I try to develop in this book is this idea that sovereignty is not simply about rights of governments. Sovereignty is, to some extent, conditional or contractual, and those governments who wish to enjoy the protections and benefits of sovereignty also owe something. And one of the things they owe is, again, not to massacre their own people or leave them vulnerable to massacre. There are certain things that are not allowing their territory to be used by terrorists. And the world, in a funny sort of way, agrees with some of that. If you think about it, the Taliban were removed from power because they supported or facilitated terrorism. People are saying, “You can’t hide behind sovereignty; you are going to lose your sovereignty or your power because of it.”
This idea that I’m talking about in terms of genocide actually enjoys a lot of support in this country and in Europe. It doesn’t enjoy a lot of support elsewhere in the world. The Russians, the Chinese, the Indians all have problems with this, largely because they fear it could be turned against them, given some of their internal claims. Part of what I’d like to do is have a serious conversation with all of them to see if we can place some— a fence around this idea, so hopefully the Chinese will not see it aimed at Taiwan or Tibet, or Indians wouldn’t see it aimed at Kashmir, the Russians wouldn’t see it aimed at Chechnya. If we could come up with some guidelines for our understanding of sovereign obligations and international remedies in a way that they could sign on to them or at least not block them.
And then secondly, beyond that policy issue, there’s a question of means. And it’s clear to me that a lot of these problems are going to take place in Africa, conceivably, though, also we’ve seen it in Asia, and we also see it in our hemisphere, in Haiti, and it could spread elsewhere. If there’s an answer, I think it’s pretty likely that it’s going to come from regional organizations. The world is simply not going to have the will or, at times, the means to introduce forces. So what we are going to need are relationships with regional organizations where we help them develop capacities, and then when those capacities are needed, we then facilitate their entry into the area where they’re needed.
I think this probably has gone farthest with the African Union, which, by the way, has also gone farthest in setting the policy principle; where you now have—in the new constitution of the African Union, you have the principle that governments are not allowed to carry out genocide, and if they do, the parliament of the African Union can authorize an intervention by African states to deal with the problem. This is, to me, an interesting political breakthrough. But they need help with the means, and the United States and others should be doing a lot more.
ZAKARIA: All right. I’m going to use my position to ask the last question, which is, if you were back in government, what is the one thing you would want to do more than anything else, other than punch out some policy-maker whom you’ve had disagreements with? Substantively, what would you do if you could wave a magic wand and there’s only one thing you can do? What’s the worst American policy, foreign policy, right now, that you would want to correct?
HAASS: I’d probably—one which I’ve already mentioned, which is not the worst, but a major opportunity is getting a new global trade round. That’s one thing I would do. The other thing I’d probably focus on most is North Korea, if there is one immediate problem. Long term, I’m more worried about managing China’s rise, Russia’s drift or decline, we can go around the world. But if there is one immediate thing that worries me more than anything else, it’s North Korea. The idea that a regime of this sort, in as closed a society as it is, is sitting on, I don’t know, enough nuclear material to make five bombs, 10 bombs, 15 bombs; that has sold counterfeit dollars; that sells drugs; that sells missile technology and parts—the idea that they clearly have taken plutonium, and we don’t know whether they’ve weaponized them. We clearly know they have a missile program that has some capacity. We don’t know how far they may or may not be along in uranium enrichment. The idea that we are going to live in a world where this regime is going to have that capacity to do damage, either directly or indirectly by handing it off or selling it to some terrorist group, that scares me more than any other immediate prospect.
So I would want to—if I could change any policy in a day, it would be to change our policy towards North Korea because when I look out in the short run, it, to me, is the scariest prospect facing the United States where I can think of policy changes.
Something like Iraq is a terribly difficult challenge, but I can’t think of policy changes at this point that would make an appreciable difference. And again, other things I’d say are longer term. But if you force me to choose one, I’d probably go there.
ZAKARIA: Ladies and gentlemen, all of you know Richard Haass, but I think you now see what an incredibly smart, capable, and decent person we have as the president of the Council. [Applause]
HAASS: Thank you, Fareed. [Applause]
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