The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy, With Richard Haass

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is The future of U.S. foreign policy.

 

With me to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the United States is Richard Haass. Richard, as I'm sure most listeners know, is the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, he's an experienced diplomat and policymaker, having served under four presidents and in a variety of positions in the Defense Department, the State Department, The White House, and on Capitol Hill. He is also a prolific author, having written or edited sixteen books. His most recent book is titled, The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens. Richard will be stepping down as the Council's president this Friday, June 30th, after twenty years of distinguished leadership of CFR.

 

Richard, thank you for joining me.

 

HAASS:
Thank you, Jim. And I could not have done it nearly as well without your assistance every inch of the way.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, that's very kind. I really appreciate it, Richard. I want to look forward, but I'd like if we may, to start by looking backward. You were on the staff of the National Security Council for George H.W. Bush. So you were there as history was being made with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the world's response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Are you surprised given the optimism that surrounded the end of the Cold War, that we are where we are today?

 

HAASS:
Surprise doesn't begin to capture it. And indeed, I don't think I am alone in that and I don't think I will be alone in that. When historians look back on this, and they look at this roughly three decade arc: from the peaceful end of the Cold War on terms even optimists had trouble conjuring up, the successful management of Iraqi aggression against Kuwait, talk of a new world order, a moment where the United States had good relations, both with the Soviet Union, the precursor of Russia, as well as with China. 

 

Fast-forward three decades later to where we are now: war in Europe, a totally alienated Russia, U.S.-Chinese relations having reached something of a nadir in their relationship, problems with North Korea, Iran, climate change, pandemics, a divided United States. I didn't begin to have the imagination to come up with this image of the future, and even a pessimist would not have. I mean, quite honestly, what historians will find challenging, Jim, I think, is how did we get to where we are from there. It reminds me of the old joke, "How do you get a small fortune? You start out with a big one." Well, I feel the United States, we now have a small fortune, but we got there the wrong way.

 

LINDSAY:
So talk to me about your thoughts on how we got from there to here. Because I'll note you wrote a book back in 2005 called The Opportunity, in which you were still quite optimistic about what American power could achieve in the world and what it could avoid.

 

HAASS:
I was an optimist once. I've lost some of it. I am struggling with the answer to that question. Indeed, I may be motivated at some point to write about it. I mean, I've written about it in pieces. You mentioned The Opportunity. I wrote a book, A World in Disarray. I've written any number of books about American foreign policy over these three decades: War of Necessity, War of Choice. So I've dealt with various presidents or various challenges. And the question I am struggling with as a, I don't quite deserve the description, historian, but I can play a historian on TV, is: how did we get here? What accounts for it?

 

Let me give you two dramatically opposing or set different schools of thought—and I'll say at the outset, they're not mutually exclusive. Like everything else in life, it's a question of percentages or degree. One is that it was inevitable; that the post-Cold War moment thirty-plus years ago was an exception to the laws and rules of history. It was a strange moment of America... A degree of primacy that's unnatural; a degree of harmony that was unnatural. And what we've seen is the gradual reemergence of the stuff of history: competition, geopolitics, what have you. Other school of thought is much less history-based and much more, you almost call, I guess, foreign policy-based. Essentially attributes it to errors of American foreign policy or the foreign policy choices of other or both. It would be acts of omission and commission alike--things we did, things we didn't do. 

 

And I realized the glib answer, "Well, obviously it's all of the above." Okay. But then the devil's in the details. And what I'm interested in is thinking really hard, and I can raise the questions now more than the answers, which is, "What are the details there? And what were the critical moments? What were the big drivers of this?" Because, I'll be honest with you, I lean towards the school of thought that this was not inevitable. I don't yet have my percentages, but I didn't think then—as you said, I was optimistic—I don't think now, as we're living through it, I don't think it was inevitable.

 

LINDSAY:
I will say on that score, I've mentioned how you've written many books. You've also written numerous articles. And I recall one of them in which you referred to the thirty years after the end of the Cold War as "the squandering." That America had, in essence, squandered what it inherited.

 

HAASS:
I lean in that direction. We had such advantages. We didn't have anything remotely like a pure competitor. Now obviously China has emerged, and that was something I don't believe we could have stopped. We maybe could have influenced its personality a little bit differently along the way, but that's an interesting question.

 

But I'm not arguing with your point. I do lean in the direction that we squandered it. Now I'm sensitive to political culture. That as bad as Putin is, there's elements of Putinism and Russian behavior that one might say fits squarely into Russian history. When I look at China, even if the United States had gotten it differently, there's others who would say it was inevitable that great power tensions would arise as China's strength grew and it became slightly more of a competitor with the United States. I remember writing articles or books or whatever about non-polarity, the idea that we're living in a world of the increasing distribution or dissemination or proliferation of power in various forms, so again, American advantage would necessarily go down— Fareed Zakaria has written thoughtfully about the "rise of the rest." So I get all that. That's why it's not all or nothing.

 

LINDSAY:
But what would you list, Richard, as the major errors in American foreign policy on the choice side, that perhaps either change the direction of history or spin it up?

 

HAASS:
Again, I reserve the right to what we used to say in the-

 

LINDSAY:
"Extend and revise your remarks," as they say on Capitol Hill.

 

HAASS:
Thank you, my distinguished colleague. I appreciate it. I would say a few things. One is the Bush administration, Bush forty-one, who I think is one of the fine presidents of American history, post-World War II or anytime.

 

LINDSAY:
He looks better year by year.

 

HAASS:
I agree. And I think historians will so judge it. He didn't really flesh out the idea of a new world order, which I thought was a bit of an act of omission.

 

LINDSAY:
Not the greatest choice of words.

 

HAASS:
Not the greatest choice of words. As I teased him and Brent Scowcroft at the time. There might have been more ... No, there was clearly more we could have done vis-à-vis Russia, or that point the Soviet Union. What effect it would've had, we can debate, but I don't believe... I indeed, I remember conversations at the time and just the administration towards the end of 1992, you'll remember this, was really running away from foreign policy because all the pressure was on forty-one to show that he was in tune with domestic.

 

LINDSAY:
He knew the price of the gallon of milk.

 

HAASS:
Exactly, but almost like a tennis player... He was basically running around his backhand there, and I thought that was a mistake. Maybe I got that backwards, but you get the idea. So I think he could have done a bit more, but it was more subsequent presidents. And I would say some of the problems were overreach, the glaring example of overreach was the Iraq War of 2003.

 

LINDSAY:
Which you discussed in your book, War of Necessity, War of Choice.

 

HAASS:
Yeah. That doesn't get any better in retrospect. I don't take back any of what I said. Some of what we did also in Afghanistan at the time... Actually Afghanistan, it's too detailed to probably get into, but there were examples of underreach and overreach along the way. The Clinton administration really didn't do much in the way of foreign policy. I remember Michael Mandelbaum wrote a scathing article in Foreign Affairs about foreign policy as social work

 

LINDSAY:
Did not endear him to the Clintons.

 

HAASS:
No. And they basically did all these fairly ineffective interventions but didn't deal with a lot of the big issues, I thought. The United States I think was right to let China into the WTO, but wrong not to monitor the relationship once it was in. And I was not-

 

LINDSAY:
We never seemed to have set up any mechanism for assessing compliance.

 

HAASS:
Exactly.

 

LINDSAY:
And we kept excusing it because people kept hoping that we would make a lot of money down the road, that China would eventually turn the corner.

 

HAASS:
There was the hope that we would benefit financially or economically and also a kind of unfounded optimism that inevitably China would evolve in positive ways. As the old cliché goes, hope is not a strategy. And we paid for a lack of strategy.

 

I think NATO enlargement was a questionable policy at many points. I could go around. But I think again, it's this combination of omission and commission. I'd say the Obama administration... The red line in Syria was a fiasco, raising fundamental doubt... Far transcended Syria, just raised fundamental questions. The intervention in Libya was a mistake. Then not following up the intervention in Libya was mistake. The off again, on again policies towards Iraq. Indeed, taking a step back, the entire focus on the greater Middle East, who would've thought that the principle geographic arena of American foreign policy for thirty years after the Cold War wouldn't be the Asia-Pacific, one what's now called the Indo-Pacific; Wouldn't be Europe; the areas of great powers would instead be the Middle East, a part of the world that has no great powers. That was not, shall we say-

 

LINDSAY:
It was not on the bingo card back in 1993.

 

HAASS:
It was not on the strategic bingo card... I like that. I may steal that from you. But it was not on the bingo card. The Trump administration was peculiar in its own way, it not only continued some of the Obama retrenchment or underreach, but also added a degree of just total unpredictability and a lack of reliability, which was another factor. So much of what we do in the world depends upon countries knowing they can depend on us. And what we essentially did was say, "Well maybe you can't." If you want to have influence, there's no quicker way to undermine it. 

 

And this administration, the Biden administration, though they've got one big thing right, and I want to say that, which is the general direction of our policy towards Ukraine... We've gone from what you might call "America-first" to "Allied-first", and I applaud that.

 

But there are again, big things missing. I thought they made a tremendous mistake, not simply how they got out of Afghanistan, but I thought getting out was a mistake. There's no trade policy to speak of. We're not in the major trading initiative of our time, and there's continuity there. Indeed, there's more continuity... No one will like this, this will be a bipartisan moment because I'll bring people together here. But if I look at the Obama, Trump, Biden foreign policies, there's actually more continuity than one would think. And what I think explains it, Jim, is it's a bit of a collective response to the overreach of forty-three, to the George W. Bush administration. 

 

And what we're seeing is Democrats and Republicans alike, much more wary of foreign entanglement, to use Mr. Washington's term, very much domestic-first in many cases, moving away in some ways from markets, more economically-nationalist. So there actually has been a pretty strong reaction. So when I look at these thirty years, I see at times inaction; I see at times overreach; I see at times underreach... Harder for me to pinpoint the successes.

 

LINDSAY:
So Richard, let me now look forward and ask you a meta question. And I'll begin with a title of-

 

HAASS:
That's not a question about Facebook.

 

LINDSAY:
It's not a question about Facebook. That's meta in a philosophical sense or the broad sense.

 

HAASS:
Just wanted to clarify that for our listeners.

 

LINDSAY:
But you wrote a book, it's called A World in Disarray. That's a situation we find ourselves in now. You have long talked about the importance of American leadership in the world. You have been critical of people who embrace, let's call it a isolationist foreign policy. We can debate about how accurate that is.

 

I would note that many of the people I talk to, particularly relatives, Christmas, Thanksgiving, 4th of July parties, people are skeptical about the benefit of America's involvement in the world. They point to Afghanistan, they point to Iraq, they point to the trillions of dollars lost, the lives lost and say, "We will be best off being less involved in the world." How do you respond to that?

 

HAASS:
In several ways. One is I understand that line of thought. I don't like it, I don't agree with it, but I understand it. And if you highlight certain things like Iraq, Afghanistan, the response to COVID-19, or according to Lancet, close to 20 million people worldwide died. I understand why people don't see much of a, how would I call it, return on investment on foreign policy. So I understand it. On the other hand, even recently there's been some real accomplishments. In forty-three's presidency, PEPFAR, must have saved... Twenty, thirty million lives because of the PEPFAR program that combated HIV aids. The current administration, I already noted the general outlines of its policy vis-à-vis Russia in Ukraine, I think have been healthy. You began before by noting Desert Shield and Desert Storm: the successful response to Saddam Hussein's aggression against Kuwait. So there's successes there. And if you look at a broader sweep of American foreign policy, makes the case for teaching history, the last I checked American intervention was decisive in World War II.

 

LINDSAY:
Indeed, the mistake there may have been waiting so long thinking that we could sit on the sidelines and not be caught up in the gale force storm that was ripping the rest of the world.

 

HAASS:
100 percent. And it underscores the lesson of what you don't do in life in foreign policy is every bit as consequential as what you do actually decide to do. If you look at the four decades of the Cold War, Jim, the idea that it stayed cold... That for the first time in history, major power competition did not lead to major power conflict, not bad. The fact that it ended peacefully. That it ended on terms that were so positive for us, for our interests. Not just peaceful, but democratic countries spinning off from the former Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe. How good was that? If you look at the last seventy, seventy-five years, you look at the fact that the average person on this planet lives decades longer, hundreds of millions, if not billions more, have a degree of freedom they never had before. So I look at all of this and I go, "Wow, American foreign policy has accomplished some big things, some great things." And these things just don't happen. Good things don't just happen.

 

So it's easy to focus on the mistakes: Vietnam, Iraq, what have you.. And they're real mistakes. And by and large the biggest mistakes... If I had to look at the three biggest mistakes of American foreign policy, at least in terms of wars since World War II: The decision in Korea to go north of the thirty-eighth parallel; Vietnam; and then Iraq; They were all what I would call, what I described as, wars of choice. And they were all examples where we tried to do too much using military force, and we paid an enormous price in lives and treasure. As bad as those mistakes were, to me, they ought not to obscure either what we did accomplish when we got things right or the risk of doing too little. It's a little bit like the cat that won't sit on the stove. I worry that the lesson of overreach inevitably leaves you to underreach. And I think we're paying a price for that.

 

LINDSAY:
I'm struck Richard, as you did that recounting that there were a lot of mistakes that involved wars of choice that didn't play out the way their proponents argued, but that a lot of our successes weren't necessarily in the military field. They clearly were with World War II, but that U.S. diplomacy, the ability of the United States to bring together coalitions, whether it was confronting Saddam Hussein in 1990, 1991, or in a range of other issues, trade human rights and the rest, really has produced big benefits, not just for the world but for us as well. But our problem is we tend, when we hear the words, "leadership," to think, use of military force.

 

HAASS:
I have probably a slightly different take on it, Jim, you used the example of the success against Saddam. It wasn't diplomacy alone. Indeed, diplomacy failed. The diplomacy only succeeded in the sense of assembling a coalition. But what-

 

LINDSAY:
Well, but that was a big accomplishment to be able to do.

 

HAASS:
I agree.

 

LINDSAY:
Because we most notably didn't get that same reaction with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

 

HAASS:
And didn't get it in 2003 when we went to war against Iraq then. I agree. But my point is simply that diplomacy did not dislodge Saddam. One of the lessons, a lot of these recent wars and a lot of these... Or other imperfect situations, is the limits of diplomacy or diplomacy plus sanctions. 

 

You look at whether it's North Korea, Iran, now with Russia, before with Iraq and Kuwait, these other instruments alone in these dramatic situations don't seem to be enough, but I take your point, they're still essential as part of a larger package. And the other lesson is, a lot of these things, we did not succeed unilaterally. That the great multiplier of American foreign policy is we have partners. Some of them are formal allies, some not. But we don't need to do things for the most part by ourselves, it tends to be much better when we do it in concert with others. And the good news is we have others we can call on.

 

LINDSAY:
The big foreign policy challenge of the day, at least to be judged by the political consensus in Washington D.C. is the need to stand up to China. Are you worried that we might be overdoing it with our bipartisan enthusiasm for standing up to China? I'm not even sure what that will necessarily mean in practice.

 

HAASS:
Well, it's a leading question, but I agree with it.

 

LINDSAY:
I watched too much Perry Mason.

 

HAASS:
We can have a long digression about Perry Mason, which totally distorted our view of the law for all of us of a certain age. But yeah, the approach towards China, it's enough to make me question bipartisanship. Because we do have this bipartisan muscular approach to China. I am hard-pressed to think of differences between the Trump and Biden administrations on China. What the similarities are ... Far, far greater. But yeah, I think that we are missing the value of diplomacy. 

 

And again, no one gets me wrong, it's not just that China's stronger. There's a lot of things that China's doing that should give us pause, particular in their accumulation and potential use of military force. And there's more we have to do in response. There has to be a diplomatic dimension there. We're also... We don't have an economic dimension in the positive sense of a participation in what used to be called TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  Our economic dimension mainly seems to be denial. But even there, the way we've characterized it, the purpose seems to be to slow or stop Chinese growth. I don't think that ought to be the way we articulate or even design our puzzle. I'm not against Chinese growth. I might be against... They're taking certain things and using them for military purposes. But China's growth per se, China's economic success is not something we should be against. 

 

I don't think we should be talking, as a previous secretary of state did, about ousting the Communist Party of China. We ought to live with China pretty much as we see it. We ought not to be encouraging Taiwan's independence. What I'm looking for is a relationship with China that's managed. I'm not naive, but we ought to find a way to put a floor under it. And we ought to be looking for potential ways, even limited ways, to collaborate.

 

The fact that the North Korea situation is as bad as it is, is in no small part because U.S.-Chinese relations are as bad as they are. We don't want to have a conflict over Taiwan. We want to have Chinese help in ultimately bringing Russia to the negotiating table vis-à-vis Ukraine. So I would invest in this relationship more. I thought the secretary of state made a mistake in canceling his visit because of the balloons. When things go wrong, that's why you have diplomats and that's when they should double down on their efforts, not call them off. I think this administration has been too worried about looking soft on China. In my view, people always make a mistake when they worry about the domestic politics of foreign policy. Do smart, successful foreign policy, and the politics will take care of themselves. And I would just do the right thing and justify it.

 

And as we talk here, I'm reassured that things seem to be, to some extent, I don't want to exaggerate, getting back on track. There's once again a diplomatic dimension, though I wouldn't exaggerate it, because the Chinese mainly seem interested at this point in limiting the economic price, the pressures they face. So this is still a relationship that doesn't have a clear floor and in some ways doesn't have a rationale. And I worry about this supercharged atmosphere in Washington where it could be hard to come up with one.

 

LINDSAY:
Richard, you mentioned the issue of accommodation or areas where the United States could cooperate with China. What do you think those might be? And I ask that against the backdrop of history, which suggested if great powers don't adjust to the rise of other great powers, you get conflict and it can be epic.

 

HAASS:
Well this might be a case where for the immediate future, Jim, the measure of the relationship is less what we can accomplish than what we can avoid.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay.

 

HAASS:
And the single most important thing would be to avoid a conflict over Taiwan, which would be economically ruinous and costly by any and every measures. That might be a definition of limited success. The limited success can be an awful lot better than failure. I would put the focus there. Secondly, I would try to make sure there are limits to what China does in the way of helping Russia, preferably yet to get... Enlist Chinese help... some type of a diplomatic effort, which I would argue we are inevitably going to end up in. This war is not going to be resolved on the battlefield. I would love to get Chinese help, but I'm much more skeptical vis-à-vis North Korea or Iran. I'm not very hopeful there.

 

Funnily enough on my list is not climate change. I think people have portrayed that issue wrong. The answer on climate change is not John Kerry meeting with his Chinese counterpart and coming up with some big joint proposal. What we need to see is better Chinese performance on climate change. They need to close some of their coal plants.

 

LINDSAY:
Well those are domestic policy choices, not foreign policy.

 

HAASS:
100 percent. So climate change may have less to do with international diplomacy than with the sum total of national performance in the United States, in China, ultimately India. And I think, at the risk of a digression here, we have got to start thinking creatively; almost analogous to what we've done in the area of pharmaceuticals. I talked about HIV/AIDS before, what we did, we weren't nearly as good with mRNA vaccines with COVID. We've got to think about how do we scale up the production and make available, in that case with drugs... Now it needs to be technologies that would help countries develop economically on trajectories that do not contribute meaningfully to climate change. So if you're an American company and you develop some technology, battery, or whatever, how do we take that technology, ow do we make it available, say to India, in a way that the company says, "Hey, we invested all this work in R&D. How do we get a return on investment?" And we say as a country, "Okay, we want to reward you fairly, but we need to make this available for the good of the world." And that's a conversation we need to have.

 

LINDSAY:
I think it's going to be a very hard conversation to start, but I want to pick up on your reference to Russia, because it's obviously a major issue confronting this administration. And I will note I've heard China likened to climate change, in terms of what it means for world order. Whereas I've heard Russia described as a hurricane, that is an immediate acute challenge to what we face. How should the Biden administration approach this issue going forward? We're in the middle of a new Ukrainian counteroffensive, and it's unclear how well it is going to go. I guess there's a chance it could lead to Ukraine reclaiming all of its sovereign territory. I think that's a very low probability outcome. So how should we be thinking about the war in Ukraine?

 

HAASS:
You're right. First of all, China's the big, if you will, strategic challenge facing the United States. Russia's more the immediate challenge. Though, even if we succeed in dealing with Russia in Ukraine, a disaffected Russia with thousands and thousands of nuclear warheads is also a lingering challenge. And it begs the question, I can't answer it now, of what will be the Russian takeaway from Ukraine. Either way, no matter what the outcomes are, whether success, failure, and so forth, that one can imagine a problematic Russia, regardless. Indeed, that's the likely initial follow-up.

 

Look, I think at this point we've got to persuade the Russians they're not going to be able to realize their goals in Ukraine, though it's a little bit hard to know exactly what their goals are anymore. I think they've dialed down substantially their initial goals of essentially eradicating Ukraine as a sovereign country. I would assume now their goals are something like keeping Crimea and keeping Donetsk, and so forth. We're helping Ukraine to try to recover some of this land. I'm fairly skeptical on how much Ukraine is going to be able to accomplish militarily. We'll know soon enough. I think we'll know in six months, plus or minus... When we see what things look like at the end of this "fighting season," say late autumn of 2023. But if things don't go much better, it's going to be hard to argue that two, three, four, five more years of fighting are going to bring about a fundamentally different outcome. There's also the problem, "There might not be much Ukraine left to save." I worry about that Putin could be right: The staying power of the West. Put aside the idea that Donald Trump may be the occupant of the White House.

 

I think in the short run, the Russians are going to wait and see. It's easy for them to sit, because they're heavily dug in. They're skeptical of the staying power. But I think what we need to do is put them on the defensive with diplomatic proposals and also a degree of reassurance. And that's where again, I think we need to enlist the Chinese and the Indians. We need to basically see if we can't both put pressure on the Russians... Persuade them that they can't get the other eighty plus percent of Ukraine, but maybe have certain reassurances down the road about their potential reintegration in Europe or the world...But let me make it clear, I would not advocate, and I don't advocate that Ukraine ever give up its goals of reclaiming its territory. I think that's essential for world order. It just doesn't have to be accomplished militarily. That's a means question, not an end. 

 

And what I would ultimately want to do is link Russian reintegration, reduction of sanctions, and the rest, to an acceptance of Ukraine regaining sovereignty over its territory. And there could be, indeed probably should be, all sorts of special provisions for certain areas in parts of Crimea or the eastern parts of Ukraine, where you have populations that are Russian-speaking and different than the rest of Ukraine. So I think that's now a fact of life. All of that can be on the table, but I think in the short run we have to see what happens, what Ukraine can do militarily. And if I'm right, and if there is a ceiling on that, then I think probably by late this year a diplomatic process has to begin in earnest, but it has to be done against the backdrop also of security assurances. Russia can't see diplomacy being introduced as a sign of weakness. What they have to see is simply, it's another tool being used and that's where again, at the risk of repeating myself, we need to get the Chinese and others, Indians, involved so the Russians understand that time is not necessarily unlimited for them either.

 

LINDSAY:
Richard, I want to turn the discussion from looking abroad to looking at home.

 

HAASS:
Yes, sir.

 

LINDSAY:
You wrote almost a decade ago a book titled, Foreign Policy Begins at Home.

 

HAASS:
Yes, sir.

 

LINDSAY:
I mentioned that the top of the discussion that your most recent book is The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens. Obviously having an effective, efficient foreign policy requires things working well at home. Do you think we're going to be able to get out of our own way to actually execute a predictable, reliable, efficient foreign policy?

 

HAASS:
The short answer is I don't know. I mean, you spent a lot of your career looking at similar issues. I'm not sanguine, so the answer is I don't have a crystal ball. When I used to head policy planning, I used to say I run policy planning, not policy predicting.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay.

 

HAASS:
Can't see the future. But let me put it this way, I'm not sanguine, which is not to me say... I'm not the opposite. I haven't given up. I haven't written us off, but we're not where we need to be and we're not on a trajectory that we need to be. It's the reason I'm writing these books, reason I'm talking about things like civics in our schools, public service, different types of behaviors in our politics. And yeah, the connection to what we've been talking about is our ability to offer up an image of democracy that others might want to emulate is at stake; the ability to reassure our allies that we'll be there for them is at stake; the ability to deter our foes...

 

When you talk about American democracy, it's enough to say American democracy's at risk. Turns out also, the world's at risk. Because America has played such an outside role in the world and our ability to play it effectively depends upon something that you and I used to take for granted, essentially a functioning democracy. Well, we no longer have that luxury. We can't take it for granted. I'm not writing it off, I'm just saying that it is something that we would be wrong to assume will be the case. The fact that I have to say that, I'll be honest with you, I never thought I'd say it. It worries me, but there you have it. We are where we are.

 

LINDSAY:
Richard, you spent much of your life in what might call the ideas industry, but you've also been in the people industry. It's a big part of what we do here at the Council and you've championed a lot of different things. And I'm just wondering, for the younger people listening to our conversation, what advice you might have for them. I would suggest they read your book, The World: A Brief Introduction, and I also perhaps go back and find The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur, which you wrote early in your career, which I think is very helpful for people going into government service. But what suggestions do you have or what advice would you like to give people who are thinking about whether or not it makes sense for them to go into government service or into foreign policy specifically?

 

HAASS:
The best advice I could give young people is not to overthink it. Don't put too much pressure on yourself. Think about your twenties or even your early thirties as a time to experiment a bit with what you do. The equivalent would be in medicine. When you become an MD and you're not expected to have chosen your specialty yet, and you get your residency-

 

LINDSAY:
You do the rotations.

 

HAASS:
You do rotations. You do this for six months surgery or this for six months on something else and something else. I would almost treat the first decade of your career the same way. Divide it into two year chunks and say, "Okay, I'm going to try this. I'm going to try that. I don't know if it's right for me."

 

Put yourself in situations where you're going to learn, where you're going to be exposed. You might find out what you like, just as important, you'll find out what you don't like. You might find out something you're totally unprepared for, or unexpected. You might have a great mentor that will totally redirect your career. The most important thing is to get moving and put yourself into situations where you'll be challenged and where you will be exposed to things and where you will learn. Don't, again, pressure yourself to getting it right before you start. Assume you won't.

 

I mean, it's a little bit like saying, "I'm only going to go up to swing at the pitch if I know I'm going to get a home run." Well, nobody does that. So give yourself five swings, or ten swings, and that's the best advice I could have.

 

And I would love, for people listening to this, that at least one of those would be in government or go work in a political campaign or go work in some NGO that's involved in politics, or certain states, like California, now have large public service programs. Something to be done in gap years, for example, to go work for a congressman or think about joining the foreign service or the military or the intelligence. And it doesn't have to be a career decision. It doesn't have to be a thirty or forty-year decision. It might be a couple of years-decision. Well, great. Or go work for a company. I mean, again, or an NGO. Go spend a couple of years abroad. The best thing you can do is put yourself in motion in ways where you're exposed to interesting things and you'll learn a lot and hopefully you will, again, you'll discover things about yourself. My guess is you'll end up in places ultimately that you never imagined, and that's the best thing. That's the reason you start going down this path.

 

LINDSAY:
Final question.

 

HAASS:
Yes, sir.

 

LINDSAY:
Are you going to continue appearing on Morning Joe?

 

HAASS:
Well, I know I'm going to appear on this podcast, if you'll have me. I want to say that first of all.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. We'll have you back.

 

HAASS:
Morning Joe... I don't think my relationship with them will be altered by the fact that I will have changed from president to president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. Indeed, I'm going to continue doing a lot of things I'm doing. I'll continue to write articles. I'll continue to write books. I'll continue to talk the issues, be they foreign policy issues or domestic issues, aren't going away. I'll continue to produce the Home & Away Newsletter on Substack. I'm wired into the conversations, the debates about our democracy and about our role in the world. I'll probably do some other things. I'm not a kid anymore, but I still like the idea of having new chapters. But yeah, I'll continue to get up early. Do battle with... Actually, there's one thing you and the folks at Morning Joe have in common, Mr. Lindsay.

 

LINDSAY:
What might that be?

 

HAASS:
You are all unfortunately, and depressingly, Red Sox fans, and I feel compelled to show up, even though recently the Yankees lost three or four games to your-

 

LINDSAY:
Four or five, but who's counting?

 

HAASS:
Yeah, I knew it was something like that. I was in denial. So yes, I feel that I am obligated to show up in order to push back against the likes of you and Mr. Scarborough, and Mr. Lemire and-

 

LINDSAY:
Mr. Barnicle.

 

HAASS:
Mr. Barnicle. There's just a lot of you. So Willie Geist and I are two lonely men standing up for all that's good and right in the world, known as the New York Yankees.

 

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Richard, first off, thank you for joining me today. Second, thank you very much for everything you've done at the Council. Third, thank you very much for everything you've done for me personally. And even though I am deeply in your debt, you cannot get me to root for the New York Yankees.

 

HAASS:
It's good to see you're a man of principle to the end.

 

LINDSAY:
That I am. Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us your review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed in The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.