Can I just 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.
US-China. Is it a trade war?
US-Syria. Are we ending war?
And Israel-Palestine. It's a forever war.
It's your GZERO World. I'm Ian Bremmer and we are here in downtown New York City.
Spring is not quite sprung, but we're getting there, I can feel it. It's a great show
for you this week. We've got Richard Haass, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Going to talk about life's rich tapestry, a global environment. He's getting much
more pessimistic about the Trump administration and lots of other things. Got your Puppet Regime, of course.
It's a global conversation of key world leaders. We've got some secret footage coming your way.
And finally, a shameless plug: my tenth book– I can't even believe it – "Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism,"
coming out in just a few weeks. We'll be talking about it then, but if you want to buy it, you certainly can now.
And now, your world this week.
The Americans announced big tariffs against the Chinese. The markets went down.
Then they went back up. The Chinese announced big tariffs against the Americans. Markets went down.
Then they went up. Is this reversion to the mean? Is this people buying the dip? No no,
what it really is, is understanding that the headline is not implementation of tariffs.
Everyone is talking trade war. In reality, it's trade war posturing. The United States
has a much larger economy than the Chinese. They think that if they say some tough things
that the Chinese are going to back down. The Chinese have stronger political strategy.
They've got Xi Jinping. He can implement everything. They've got no rule of law. They think that
they can back the Americans down. We'll see who wins. Key thing to watch? This weekend,
Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Boao Forum, which is their sort of version of Davos.
Is he going to start talking negotiation or willingness to engage with the Americans? But the key
thing to recognize here is it's a couple of months before the Americans announce which
tariffs and how much they're actually going to implement after the corporations come back
and say it's going to hurt us, we need to whittle it down, the Chinese engage.
We are very far from seeing what these tariffs actually mean. US-China relations are clearly getting worse.
There are a lot of people that want the Americans to hit China around Trump.
Certainly his advisers. But that doesn't mean he wants to take a big economic hit himself. If there's
one thing Trump pays attention to, it's how the markets react to what he says.
And now to the Middle East. Most specifically Syria, where the United States has still some
2,000 troops on the ground, but maybe not a mission. President Trump says he wants them out,
the United States has basically destroyed ISIS and its caliphate. But the Pentagon says no,
they should still be there. Why should they still be there? I mean, after the caliphate
is destroyed, the United States doesn't really know what it's doing. It's kind
of supporting the Kurds, but not really. Most of the Kurds are already moving to fight the
Turks at this point. You've got Bashar Assad, he's already there, he's basically won.
The country's been destroyed. You've got some 5 million refugees, over 500,000 dead.
That was all done while the Americans decided not to act. It's a little late now.
2,000 troops isn't all that much, but I swear it is for the families of those that
are actually there. I completely understand why Trump wants to remove this as an issue,
especially because if Trump decides that he wants to go after Assad for chemical weapons -
and the Russians have already said that they will hit back – do you really want those
American troops on the ground as potential targets for the Russians? I would say you don't.
I think Trump's on the right side of this one.
And I suspect he's going to get his way over Secretary of Defense Mattis.
And now to Israel-Palestine, which is never a good news story, but it's a worse news
story than usual this week. We had big demonstrations from Gaza, the most economically depressed
portion of the Palestinian population. Massively frustrated, led by Hamas, militants against
Israel coming right up to the border. Israel has an exclusion zone, a buffer. They have
rules of operation. And everyone knows if anyone comes into that zone, they will use
tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. Some of the militants tried to breach the border,
a couple with assault weapons. The Israeli Defense Forces shot to kill and killed.
Others that were killed running away – young, some of them children, and unarmed.
There are no good outcomes here. There's no good story. People pointing the finger both ways,
but the clear point is that the ability of the Palestinians to threaten Israel is virtually zero.
The Israelis have them very effectively walled off. They're actually building a
border wall underneath the actual territory, including sensors. Three concrete factories
along the line. If you're Palestinian, the ability to force the Israelis – or really
anyone in the world – to pay attention and take up your cause, at this point, is almost zero.
And I'm here at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City
with its president, Richard Haass. He just came 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.
Great to be with you, sir.
I want to start by framing it with what has been, I think, your most viral tweet ever.
Is that true?
Actually yes.
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 it's
been largely brought out by ourselves, not by events." You've been around for a long time,
seen decades of administrations. How alarmed do you think we should really be?
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 EXCOMM, the way Kennedy organized
the U.S. 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. This is something qualitatively different.
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. 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.
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?
Surprise is probably not the operative word. Disappointed. I see all these people in Congress
turning the other way, essentially - the rougher word would be enablers, but I don't think
it's too rough, because they're too tolerant. I don't see people - all it takes is a handful
of senators to challenge this administration in the Senate. I don't see them doing that.
The House is not challenging him hardly at all. Where are people speaking out on a regular basis?
Where are they holding this administration to account? 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 will – this risks the future of the Republican Party. That you can
say that's good, you can say they're bad, but we've had a two-party system for better
and - more for better than for worse - for much of our political history.
And I actually think Republicans are putting that in jeopardy.
Now you know these senators. I mean, when you talk to them about these issues and you're
saying, you know, 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.
No. I think they feel basically that if they take this administration on publicly, they'll
lose any ability to influence it. You know, they don't like talking about the political
challenges they might face at home, but obviously they're grown-ups. 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. They'd lose
whatever little influence they have. I don't buy it. But I think that's what they - that's what they believe.
To link this with Russia - why do you think Trump has been so surprisingly unwilling
to criticize Putin directly?
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,
It does not make sense to you.
It does not - 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 poison – you know, the attempted murder of the Russian -
you know, the former agent, whatever you want to call it, in Britain. 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 Ukraine, which
I thought was a step in the right direction. But the general unwillingness of the president -
despite what the intelligence community is saying, despite the evidence - to stand
up to Russian interference in our political process is…to me, it's inexplicable.
And so then, it forces people down the rabbit hole of speculation.
Ok, let's move to another one: North Korea. So I've been a little more…I don't want
to say optimistic, but a little less concerned than you have. Last time we talked, you were -
I think I got you down to 30% likelihood of military strikes from 50. I felt good about that.
Where are you right now? How - what do you think the timing potentially is of
this either getting really bad or ok, you think this meeting is going to happen?
I'm actually probably an outlier here. I do think the meeting is 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 will 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 it happens. The danger in this 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 say, well we tried diplomacy, that didn't work.
Now let's flip the switch.
And now we got Bolton.
Now we have to use military force. So to me it's the danger – again, I admit it,
I'm a traditionalist. You know, that's why I am where I am. But I worry about this kind of
a roll of the dice. I've never quite seen anything like it.
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?
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.
At the end of the ten years.
I think we made the cardinal error of wanting an agreement too much. That said, this is
the agreement we got. 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 - in many ways, longer than that - 10 years, 15 years to see what happens in Iran
domestically, to emphasize a follow-on agreement, which – in the book you were kind enough
to mention - I argue for. I think what we should do is sit down and say look, these
ought to be 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
is going about it will make it impossible to get that. We do not need a near-term crisis over this.
And can I just 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.
There is no good case for breaking this agreement. Now it's not - 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?
Yeah. Harder to do that if you're transactional in the short term and in policy orientations.
Exactly. And it's the reason - it probably brings us to our next topic – is that you
have a National Security Council. The whole idea is to see things in the hall. To take
a step back, to see the tradeoffs. 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?
One of the reasons you bring everybody together through a national security process
is to see tradeoffs. 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 tradeoffs.
You're not thinking about precedents. That is really a dangerous way to go about national security policy.
So at least we'll finally have the person in that position that you know can get it done in John Bolton.
I knew you were going there.
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?
First of all, he's more than just one guy. That position is extraordinarily influential.
You know, the Secretary of Defense has to worry about hundreds of thousands of people
in uniform, far flung operations. Secretary of State's on the road a lot.
The National Security Adviser'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 who also didn't come into the office, shall we say, with a
rich reservoir of background on these issues. So this is an influential person. John Bolton -
the problem is, I think his judgment, shall we say, his track record isn'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.
Confusing that with the so-called preventive attack at the risk of boring everybody out
there, but he argued that the threat was imminent. There's questions about judgment. And there's
questions about temperament. You know, 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 adviser we've ever had, Brent Scowcroft. 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 - 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. I haven't seen in John Bolton a willingness to do that. Now can people grow
in a job? 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. A real question
I think is Mike Pompeo. How he acts in this job and, you know, 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 –
He's good with Congress.
Very good with Congress, given his own background. He's now experienced with a lot of the issues,
was at West Point. 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 unknown.
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 think - you know, 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.
The one place that we haven't gotten 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?
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 has been a little bit more muted with China.
We're now finally having the kind of talks we should have had with the exceptions, with the allies.
By and large a good thing, so we'll see.
It is interesting they've come back in recent weeks and talked a little more about maybe
leaving the TPP was not such a great idea.
Beginning to see that. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, commonly called the TPP, 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 a great way - I guess you'd call
it geo-economics. Linking countries economically who are also linked strategically. And it
would have been 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.
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.
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.
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
have 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. This administration though has not been content with that.
What it's done is basically every day, added to the inbox. And so much of this is self-generated.
So they've taken a difficult situation and they've made it several times worse. And that's where -
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.
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 use, might push a crisis in one area
in order to help distract from a crisis –
The wag the dog scenario.
Without going there.
Yeah. Don't need to go there.
Don't need to go there.
But by itself, the geopolitical environment we're seeing today, you would consider
the most dangerous of your professional career?
It is, and something I never thought I'd say. 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 most of our -
some of our biggest problems are actually again, self-created, like 2003 and the war there.
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 nonstate alike, who
can make a real difference and often are anything but benign. You've got the 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. So yeah,
I am worried about where we are and when I - I always feel as if the foreign policy equivalent
of the 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 it with. And that, in a nutshell, is why I'm so worried.
Is China - is Xi Jinping and his stability and strength - the hope at the bottom of Pandora's box?
I mean what - in that environment, where are you looking for light?
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. 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
is going to replace us is to me - shows a real misunderstanding of China and what the
requirements are to be a world leader. 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. We want to go do something else. That's what we've done.
We've abdicated without a clear alternative. And it to me 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 inelegant 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.
Richard Haass, great to be with you.
Ian Bremmer, great to be with you.
That's your show this week. Come back next week. We've got Moises Naim, the former
Minister of Trade for Venezuela. Now Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie and head of Efecto Naim.
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.
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