Podcast: Haasstile Actors

Transcript

Listen: President Donald J. Trump is on the cusp of waging three wars at once: political, economic, and boots-on-the-ground real.

So says Council on Foreign Relations President Richard N. Haass in a remarkably chipper interview.

TRANSCRIPT: Haasstile Actors

Dr. Richard Haas:

Can I just kind of suggest a rule of thumb? Maybe we ought to limit ourselves to one nuclear crisis at a time. I know that's a radical point of view, but one's probably enough.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. I'm host of the weekly show, "GZERO World" on Facebook Watch. In this podcast, we share extended versions of the big interviews from that show.

Ian Bremmer:

This week, I sit down with Dr. Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and former advisor to then Secretary of State Colin Powell. He's a leading foreign policy expert and author of "A World in Disarray," now available in paperback. Today we'll be talking about the three wars President Trump is waging or could wage in the near future. Let's get to it.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of surface, safety and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

Ian Bremmer:

And I'm here at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City with its president, Richard Haas. He's just come out with the paperback version of a fantastic book, "A World in Disarray." He was head of policy planning of the Bush administration, on "Morning Joe" all the time, and just a fantastic guy. I really love talking with him about global issues. Richard, great to be with you today.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Great to be with you, sir.

Ian Bremmer:

I want to start by framing it with what has been, I think, your most viral tweet ever. Is that true?

Dr. Richard Haas:

Actually, yes.

Ian Bremmer:

You said, "@realDonaldTrump is now set for war on three fronts: political versus Bob Mueller, economic versus China and others allies on trade, and actual versus Iran and/or North Korea. This is the most perilous moment in modern American history and has been largely brought out by ourselves, not by events."

Ian Bremmer:

You've been around for a long time, seen decades of administrations. How alarmed do you think we should really be?

Dr. Richard Haas:

The short answer [is] that this is a five-alarm fire. And when I did the tweet, got a little bit of pushback and some people say, "This is exaggeration, this is hyperbole." And they put forward some other times in, quote, unquote, "modern history" that they thought were worse. One was the Cuban Missile Crisis; but then I remind people that was simply us and the Soviet Union. We had the excom, the way Kennedy organized the US government was really exquisite. For good reason, it's a case study. Even the Soviet Union at that point had institutional leadership. So, it was just one thing going on, two very organized political entities.

Dr. Richard Haas:

This is something qualitatively different. There's more rings to the circus than you or I could count. And this administration's been accused of many things, but being organized is probably not one of them. The closer parallel is in some ways, I think, to the early '70s, to the Nixon administration. You had Vietnam as well as the crisis in the Middle East, the October War. You obviously had Watergate and you had all sorts of economic problems. Oil prices because of the October War, the changing policies about dollar convertibility, and so forth. And that was an administration fighting, if you will, multiple wars on multiple fronts. But also at the end of the day, when you think about it, Nixon was an insider. For all of his many flaws and complexities, he was still pretty much a conservative. He believed in the system.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Donald Trump is something very different. He's an outsider. He's not a conservative, whatever else he may be. And again, he's not surrounding himself with a process, which is really one of the real purposes of process, that protects him and allows him to focus on multiple challenges at once. So, when I look at this array of situations where you and I, we go through each one that expect in detail about what's going to happen on the legal and political front, the economic front, and the security front. I can't sit here with any confidence about what's going to happen or that somehow it's quote, unquote, "all going to turn out all right." I'll be honest with you Ian, I don't feel that.

Ian Bremmer:

So, the global environment, at least in the '70s, was much more stable-

Dr. Richard Haas:

Absolutely.

Ian Bremmer:

... than it is today, geopolitically. And also, the crises you were talking about in the '70s were not self-inflicted, where the ones you're talking about right now, I mean, these crises at least in part are being visited upon the United States by ourselves.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Well, it's certainly the one with Iran is essentially entirely being visited by this administration on its own. The North Korea one's more complicated. Clearly, whoever was the 45th president, he or she was going to be greeted by a North Korea that had finally reached levels of capability with its weapons and its missiles that forced a crisis.

Dr. Richard Haas:

What this administration, though, is doing is either by the impulse towards diplomacy and the summit or this rough rhetoric for over a year, the public contemplation of using military force, the rejection of the idea of deterrents, which among others H.R. McMaster had done repeatedly, this administration is forcing this as a crisis rather than as a foreign policy problem to be worked.

Ian Bremmer:

Not just the wars, but the trade issue, the China issue, clearly the political, the investigation issue and all of these in a sense are self-imposed.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Clearly, the Mueller thing is by what the administration's done. And also if you go back to Watergate, what's always important is not just what you did. Often, it's how you respond to what you did. And that's where issues of perjury, obstruction, and all the rest...

Dr. Richard Haas:

What worries me watching it is the sustained effort to delegitimize the Mueller investigation. And I don't know what that means. I don't know if that's a prelude to firing him. I don't know if that's a prelude to allowing him to finish his work and then hoping whatever his findings are, they don't get traction. And that there's a whole 40% of America, including a lot of people on The Hill who basically say, "We don't care, Mueller's politically motivated, we're not going to take it seriously or take it at face value." I don't know. But talk about a political and constitutional crisis. That is something that we could be heading there domestically.

Dr. Richard Haas:

And again, the combination of a country, to use my favorite word, in disarray at home at the same time it's facing this sort of inbox of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, any number of other issues, plus triggering a trade crisis on any number of fronts, this combination of things... Again, if you're not alarmed, you're not paying attention.

Ian Bremmer:

So, Let's hit these three and start with the Mueller investigation. Have you been surprised, honestly surprised, by the response of the Republican leadership in Congress to be as aligned with Trump on this as they seem to have been?

Dr. Richard Haas:

Surprise is probably not the operative word. Disappointed. I joined the Republican Party over 40 years ago and for several reasons. I was a believer in small government. Government should largely stay out of the economy, should only regulate it to the degree necessary. The United States would be strong abroad. But also, conservatives and Republicans had a conscience. There was a sense of character about the role of the individual, the responsibility of the individual to the society.

Dr. Richard Haas:

I see all these people in Congress turning the other way, essentially the rough word would be enablers, but I don't think it's too rough because they're, they're too tolerant. I don't see people... All it'll take is a handful of senators to challenge this administration in the Senate. I don't see them doing that. The House is not challenging them hardly at all. Where are people speaking out on a regular basis? Where are they holding this administration to account?

Dr. Richard Haas:

Too many Republicans, and it hurts me to say it, seem more worried about getting primaried, about getting challenged by their own political base than they do to stand up for the larger public good. And I actually think this risks the future of the Republican Party. You can say that's good, you can say that's bad. But we've had a two-party system, more for better than for worse, for much of our political history, and I actually think Republicans are putting that in jeopardy.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, you know these senators. I mean when you talk to them about these issues and you are saying, you think it's a much bigger, much more structural issue that they are risking, what's the response? Because they're not stupid people.

Dr. Richard Haas:

No, I think they feel basically that if they take this administration on publicly, they'll lose any ability to influence it. They don't like talking about the political challenges they might face at home, but obviously they're grownups, they're aware of that. But many of them feel it would be futile to do it, F-U-T-I-L-E, to do it. And they'd lose whatever little influence they have. I don't buy it, but I think that's what they believe.

Ian Bremmer:

To link this with Russia, why do you think Trump has been so surprisingly unwilling to criticize Putin directly?

Dr. Richard Haas:

I can't explain it, this sustained benign attitude towards Russia. I've seen all the speculation. I tend not to do a lot of speculation, myself. It's just not my style. I don't know, but I can't justify it on strategic terms. Let me put it that way.

Ian Bremmer:

It does not make sense to you?

Dr. Richard Haas:

It does not make sense to me. And look, just to be fair to the administration, in a couple of cases, they've done some things towards Russia that I approve of. Just recently, finally, they stood up on the attempted murder of the Russian, the former agent, whatever you want to call it in-

Ian Bremmer:

In the UK?

Dr. Richard Haas:

In the UK. I wish our response had been tougher, but at least it was a response. Unlike the Obama administration, this administration decided to give lethal weaponry to-

Ian Bremmer:

Ukraine.

Dr. Richard Haas:

... Ukraine, which I thought was a step in the right direction. But the general unwillingness of the president, despite what it is the intelligence community is saying, despite the evidence, to stand up to Russian interference in our political process, to me, it's inexplicable. And so then it forces people down the rabbit hole of speculation.

Ian Bremmer:

Do you think that Trump's view towards Russia has started to shift, has hardened somewhat? I mean, clearly the challenges we're having with the Russians has expanded significantly in the past months.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Some of the policies are a little bit tougher. Some of the utterances are finally a little bit more critical. But still, there's an enormous gap between where he and this administration are and where they need to be. And again, I can't explain, this reluctance doesn't even capture it, this refusal to essentially close the gap and to confront Russia in ways that would force them to reconsider ever doing something like this again.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay, let's move to another one. North Korea. So, I've been a little more, I want to say optimistic, but a little less concerned than you have. Last time we talked, I think I got you down to 30% likelihood of military strikes from 50. I felt good about that.

Dr. Richard Haas:

There you go, progress.

Ian Bremmer:

Where are you right now? What do you think the timing potentially is of this either getting really bad or okay? Do you think this meeting's going to happen?

Dr. Richard Haas:

I'm actually probably an outlier here. I do think the meeting's going to happen. I believe that it's so tempting for this president to have this meeting, and it may also be tempting for his North Korean counterpart to have this meeting. So, I believe it'll happen. Despite what the traditional foreign policy hands, like me would say, you never want to have a summit unless it's really carefully prepared, you've minimized the chance for surprise or uncertainty. My hunch is both of these guys, for very different reasons, want a summit. So, I think the odds are better than even that it happens.

Dr. Richard Haas:

The danger in the summit is twofold. One is that we're too anxious for a deal and we put on the table all sorts of things that would threaten our alliance relationships out there and the rest. The other is that the summit happens, it's a fiasco, and people then said, "Well, we tried diplomacy, that didn't work, now let's flip the switch."

Ian Bremmer:

And now we've got Bolton.

Dr. Richard Haas:

And now we have to use military force. So, to me, it's the danger... Again, I admit it, I'm a traditionalist, that's why I am, in some ways, where I am. But I worry about this kind of a roll of the dice. I've never quite seen anything like it.

Ian Bremmer:

On Iran, the roll of the dice being are we or are we not going to rip up a deal that we put together by ourselves?

Dr. Richard Haas:

Quite possibly we will. Which again, I do not understand this... Look, I've been critical of the Iran deal from the get go. I do think the sunset provisions on key parts of the agreement are misguided-

Ian Bremmer:

At the end of 10 years, yeah.

Dr. Richard Haas:

The centrifuge limits. So we got seven and a half years to run there, or 12 and a half years left on the enriched uranium. I think those were a mistake. There were actually debates within the negotiating team. I think we made the cardinal error of wanting an agreement too much. That said, this is the agreement we got.

Dr. Richard Haas:

And at this point, I would focus on other things that Iran is doing beyond the agreement, whether their missile program, more important, their imperial reach around the region. I would focus on those things. This gives us another seven and a half, and in many ways, longer than that, 10 years, 15 years to see what happens in Iran domestically, to emphasize a follow-on agreement, which, actually, in the book you were kind enough to mention, I argue for.

Dr. Richard Haas:

I think what we should do is sit down and say, Look, these ought to be open-ended." The NPT is open-ended. Why aren't these limits open-ended? Why should Iran be able to accumulate all the prerequisites of a serious nuclear weapons program under this agreement? They shouldn't be able to. So that's something we should press for, but the way the administration's going about it will make it impossible to get that.

Ian Bremmer:

And the Europeans and the Americans have been trying to negotiate a tougher deal. How do you think that's playing out?

Dr. Richard Haas:

Well, again, I don't think you can change this deal. I think that's not going to work. I do think the idea of a sequential, a follow-on agreement, is not inconceivable, and that ought to be our focus. But we ought to go about it in a way that doesn't get everybody's back up. This ought to be a quiet, long-term negotiation. There's no need to have a short-term crisis here.

Dr. Richard Haas:

We should be focusing on all the things Iran is doing around the region that, for good reason, give us heartburn. We should be thinking what it is we say and don't say and do and don't do that might promote certain types of internal dynamics in Iran. We do not need a near-term crisis over this.

Dr. Richard Haas:

And can I just kind of suggest a rule of thumb? Maybe we ought to limit ourselves to one nuclear crisis at a time. I know that's a radical point of view, but one's probably enough.

Ian Bremmer:

In the case of Iran, you could at least say that Trump has built pretty strong relations with key countries in the region, the Israelis and the Saudis, both of whom have not seemed to at least publicly pressed him very hard on doing anything else on Iran than he has been. You see tensions behind the scenes where they're getting a little more antsy that this is going to fall apart?

Dr. Richard Haas:

I don't. I think... Well, in Israel you have a big division between the political leadership, which seems to like this idea of challenging the agreement. But most of the people on the security side who understand that we're better off with this agreement for the foreseeable future, for the next seven and a half, 10, 12 and a half years. So there, there's clearly a split between the Netanyahu government and the larger Israeli security establishment, the Israeli deep state, if you will.

Dr. Richard Haas:

The Saudis and others are quite confrontational on this. The danger is if you end up breaking this agreement and Iran starts to have a mad dash or something towards a nuclear weapons program, the Saudis have already said, the crown prince said it the other week on 60 Minutes, that they would have a nuclear weapons program of their own.

Dr. Richard Haas:

So, again, it's in everybody's interest just to let this be and to focus on other things. Why, again... The paresident, in several areas, he said things during the campaign, this, on trade and so forth, and it's almost like as if now he's a prisoner of what he said. But there is no good case for breaking this agreement. Now, we are not better off as a result. We ought to be thinking again, how do we lock it in for the long term, not how do we undo it in the short term.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, harder to do that if you're transactional in the short term in policy orientation.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Exactly right. And it's the reason, it'll probably bring us to our next topic, that you have a National Security Council. The whole idea is to see things in the whole, to take a step back, to see the trade-offs. "Do you press this or that government on X, if you've also got to work with them on Y and Z? How do you work different issues at the same time? If you do this on Iran, how might it affect your ability to deal with North Korea or vice versa?"

Dr. Richard Haas:

One of the reasons you bring everybody together through a national security process is to see trade-offs. If you look at every issue in isolation, if you look at everything as a transaction, you're not thinking about relationships, you're not thinking about trade-offs, you're not thinking about precedents. That is really a dangerous way to go about national security policy.

Ian Bremmer:

So, at least we'll finally have the person in that position that you know can get it done in John Bolton.

Dr. Richard Haas:

I knew you were going there.

Ian Bremmer:

Someone who you've worked with. He was ambassador, acting ambassador to the United Nations. He was assistant secretary-

Dr. Richard Haas:

Under secretary for, I think, security assistance. But they had the arms control beat at the State Department for a while.

Ian Bremmer:

The media's gone a little nuts about his appointment. He's only one guy. What's he like? What's he going to be like?

Dr. Richard Haas:

First of all, he's more than just one guy. That position is extraordinarily influential. The secretary of defense has to worry about hundreds of thousands of people in uniform, far-flung operations. secretary of states' on the road a lot. The national security advisor's about 25 feet down the hall. He has more interaction with the president probably than any other person, maybe the chief of staff. But those two more than anybody else. This is a president also who didn't come into the office, shall we say, with a rich reservoir of background on these issues. So this is an influential person.

Dr. Richard Haas:

John Bolton, the problem is, I think his judgment, shall we say, his track record ain't great. Big advocate of the 2003 Iraq War. Even in retrospect, he thinks it was good. He does want to tear up the Iran agreement. He made what I thought was an intellectually weak, to say the least, disingenuous argument to justify what he called preemptive attacks on North Korea.

Ian Bremmer:

North Korea.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Confusing that with the so-called preventive attack, at the risk of boring everybody out there. But he argued that the threat was imminent. Well, by that logic we ought to be launching attacks against Russia and China. So, I thought it was really a, just to put it gently, questionable set of arguments he was making. So, I think there's questions about judgment and there's questions about temperament.

Dr. Richard Haas:

My time at the State Department, John shall we say, was rather controversial in how we used intelligence and how we reacted to reports or findings from subordinates that didn't comport with what he wanted. Well, this job, that's what you've got to do. Look, I spent four years when I worked for Bush 41, I was on the National Security Council staff and I worked with, I believe, the best national security advisor we've ever had, Brent Scowcroft.

Ian Bremmer:

Brent Scowcroft, yeah.

Dr. Richard Haas:

And the reason was that Brent understood that your role as someone who dispensed due process, who made sure the system worked, that the president got what he needed to hear and not necessarily what he wanted to hear, and not necessarily what Brent agreed with. Brent understood that his principal role, his principal hat, was to ensure that the process was intellectually and politically fair and complete. Only secondarily would he offer his own personal views, and he would never let his personal preferences get in the way of what he thought was his obligation to the system.

Dr. Richard Haas:

I haven't seen in John Bolton a willingness to do that. Now, can people grow in jobs? Sure. Would I like him to grow in this job? Absolutely, because he's going to have extraordinary influence. But that, to me, is a big question mark.

Ian Bremmer:

Mattis has come out and said he's going to work together just fine. But obviously, Mattis's policy predilections are rather different. And he's considered to be the one major policy adult left standing that's going to tell Trump exactly what he thinks, as opposed to what Trump wants to hear.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Look, Mattis has great standing in this administration, great personal authority, both substantively and stylistically. He's probably the one person here... He's also, you and I might say, is most a member of the foreign policy establishment. He actually believes in what you and I and others would call the "liberal world order." He believes in institutions. He believes in American reliability. He's careful about the use of force. He looks at the sweep of the last 70 years and says, "We've been pretty well-served by this global network of trading relationships and arrangements and alliances." He doesn't want to tear the house down. Mattis is more of a preserver.

Dr. Richard Haas:

The danger is, he's now working in an administration which has many more disruptors, beginning with the disruptor-in-chief, then it has preservers. And the question is, how long can he succeed and keep his influence as the odd man out? I think the biggest question may be, not simply does John Bolton in any way grow into the job? We'll see. I understand the grounds for skepticism. The real question, I think, is Mike Pompeo, how he acts in this job and he's got some advantages Rex Tillerson did not have. He has a close relationship with this president, as close as anyone seems to have.

Ian Bremmer:

He's good with Congress.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Very good with Congress, given his own background. He's now experienced with a lot of the issues. Was at West Point. So, he knows this stuff. And so the question is, now that he's secretary of state, which is the ultimate insider as opposed to being on the... you know the old adage, "Where you stand depends upon where you sit?" Where does Mike Pompeo come? Because in many cases, he could be decisive here. And I know a lot of people are writing him off. Based on my own personal experience with him, that's a mistake. And I would watch that space. And I am hoping that in many cases he is able to forge approaches and coalitions with people like Mattis and others. That would be quite reasonable.

Ian Bremmer:

So the one place we haven't gone to yet are the economic relations, trade relations. A lot of pushing against American allies. Though so far, implementation's spotty. A lot more pushing on China. Implementation to be seen. Well, do you feel a little bit more... I mean, of the three, do you feel more optimistic or more benignly towards this?

Dr. Richard Haas:

Well, so far, at least you're right, that when it came to the steel and aluminum tariffs, and then also with the China rhetoric, the reality's been a little bit more muted. With China, we're now finally having the kind of talks we should have had, the exceptions with the allies. By and large, a good thing, so we'll see.

Ian Bremmer:

It is interesting that they've come back in recent weeks and talked a little more about maybe leaving the TPP was not such a great idea.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Beginning to see that. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, commonly called the TPP, it was not just a smart economic plan to wire the United States and 11 other countries representing, what, over 40% of the world's economy, but strategically it was big. It was a great way, I guess you'd call it geoeconomics, linking countries economically who were also linked strategically. And it would've been a much better way, for example, to confront China. If we have issues with Chinese trade behavior, much better to force China to raise its game, to play by rules we and the other 11 could have set, but when we took ourselves out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership about just over a year ago, actually, it was in the first week of the Trump presidency, the president gave away unilaterally a powerful tool not just to help the American economy, but to in some ways curb certain Chinese trading behavior, as well as Chinese strategic assertiveness.

Ian Bremmer:

A carrot that would've been more useful over the long term. That's how they got into the WTO at the end of the day, behaved more like we wanted them to.

Dr. Richard Haas:

The whole appeal of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is that, basically, it would've told China, "Look, you want to continue all these economic relationships that are so central to your development? That's great, but you're going to have to continue them on ground rules that we are setting. You can't have your cake and eat it. You can't basically cherry-pick the advantages of trade at the same time you have massive state subsidies, you steal technology, you force countries into joint ventures. You hold tariffs high, even though you expect access to others. Uh-huh." We've been too generous in the WTO. TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership offered, I thought, an opportunity to correct some of that.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, the reason your tweet was so compelling, of course, is not because of these individual issues, but the fact that they all come together, come together in one administration, they come together in one unwinding world order, and they compound the challenges for each other.

Dr. Richard Haas:

They come together, they compound, and they're largely self-created. It's one thing to get up and you have foreign armies moving places and so forth. What's so interesting about this is how many of these things have come from within. And that's one of the great ironies of this administration, I guess I'd say.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Again, coming back to where we began, when Donald Trump came into office, his inbox was daunting. You can't choose your inbox, your inbox chooses you. This would've greeted Hillary Clinton or anybody else. It was tough. North Korea and any number of other issues, what was going on in Europe because of Russia, an unraveling Middle East, a collapsing Venezuela.

Dr. Richard Haas:

This administration though, has not been content with that. What it's done is basically every day added to the inbox. And so, so much of this is self-generated. And so they've taken a difficult situation and they've made it several times worse, and that's where we are. And it's hard to feel comfortable about an administration that's so anti-process and looks at things so separately, given our conversation, and doesn't see the connections, tends not to think about relationships and so forth, sees these things in isolation. It's got to worry you, and that's without getting into the conspiracy thinking, about how some people would suggest one might push a crisis in one area in order to help distract from a crisis in the other area.

Ian Bremmer:

The Wag the Dog scenario.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Without going there.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah, don't need to go there.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Don't need to go there.

Ian Bremmer:

But by itself, the geopolitical environment we're seeing today, you would consider the most dangerous of your professional career?

Dr. Richard Haas:

It is. And something I never thought I'd say, because my first half of my career was in the Cold War. I served at the Pentagon in the '70s, the State Department in the '80s, and grew up in that world. And then for the last 25 years, it's been somewhat different and some of our biggest problems were actually, again, self-created like 2003 and the war there.

Dr. Richard Haas:

But what worries me now is just you've got so many things going on at once. You've got globalization, which in many of its forms we haven't even begun to cope with, whether it's cyber or other places. You've got so many actors, state and non-state alike, who could make a real difference and often anything but benign. You've got a United States where there's no political consensus about what it is we ought to be doing. We've made ourselves vulnerable in certain ways, the enormous accumulation of debt.

Dr. Richard Haas:

So, yeah, I am worried about where we are. I always feel it's the foreign policy equivalent at times, this administration of healthcare policy, where you had a repeal but no replace. I feel every once in a while when it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to a lot of things, they're repealing a lot of the arrangements they inherited, but it's not clear what they're replacing with. And that, in a nutshell, is why I'm so worried

Ian Bremmer:

Is China, Xi Jinping, and his stability and strength the hope at the bottom of Pandora's box? I mean, in environment, where are you looking for light?

Dr. Richard Haas:

Well, something you and I would agree on. You called it a "GZERO World," I call it "A World in Disarray." I would think that the alternative to what has been a largely US-led world order for three-quarters of a century is going to be much more world disorder in which there's not going to be a clear leader.

Dr. Richard Haas:

China doesn't have the capacity, doesn't have the mindset, doesn't have the habits, doesn't have the incentive to do this. So, this idea that China's going to replace us, to me, shows a real misunderstanding of China and what the requirements are to be a world leader.

Dr. Richard Haas:

We've abdicated, that's what's so odd. I'm used to countries getting exhausted by the role. You saw that, say, with Britain a century ago. I'm used to countries getting weakened by it, in the case of the Soviet Union. Soviet Union was kind of the example of Paul Kennedy, overreach and what happens. The idea that a great power would simply basically wake up and say, "We don't really want to do this anymore. We've kind of had it with this role and we want to go do something else," that's what we've done. We've abdicated without a clear alternative.

Dr. Richard Haas:

And to me, it betrays a real lack of understanding about how the world affects us and how this world has benefited us. But that's this president's mindset. He really does believe that, on balance, the burdens of American world leadership are far greater and the costs are far greater than any benefits. He thinks our trade relationships, to use an elegant word, have screwed us more than they've helped us. So, he gets up and he actually wants to undo a lot of these things, and that is his mindset. And that, again, is what worries me.

Ian Bremmer:

When a world's already in disarray, already in G-Zero, that's not going to help matters very much.

Dr. Richard Haas:

No. And there again, there's no alternative out there. I really do think the alternative to a US-led order is a world that is not led and a world that is not orderly, and I think that's where we are.

Ian Bremmer:

Richard Haas, great to be with you.

Dr. Richard Haas:

Ian Bremmer, great to be with you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's your show this week. Come back next week, we've got Moisés Naím, the former minister of trade for Venezuela, now distinguished fellow at Carnegie and head of Efecto Naím. He's going to talk about Venezuela and South America and all sorts of things that you want to know about. Be with you next week.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of surface, safety and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.