Global Affairs Expert Webinar: Trump and the Future of American Statecraft
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, leads the conversation on Trump and the future of American statecraft.
Speaker
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
President
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations
Transcript
FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the first session of the Winter/Spring 2025 Global Affairs Expert Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.
Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on education.CFR.org if you would like to share the resources with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
We’re delighted to have Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar with us to discuss Trump and the future of American statecraft. Justice Cuéllar is the tenth president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a former justice of the Supreme Court of California and has served in three U.S. presidential administrations at the White House and in federal agencies. Previously, Justice Cuéllar was a professor at Stanford University and led the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also codirected Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and led its honors program in international security studies. And he is the coauthor of a recent article in Foreign Affairs entitled, “The Self-Defense of American Democracy: How Federalism Can Prevent Tyranny at the Top.”
So, Tino, thank you very much for being with us today. I thought we could start off by talking about how U.S. foreign policy priorities might shift under the second Trump administration and how domestic issues are going to intersect and interact at the—with the international agenda.
CUÉLLAR: Thank you, Irina. I look forward to the conversation and, first, let me also express my appreciation for CFR to organize this and to all of you who are joining today.
So let me start with a prologue. Imagine yourself back in October of 2016, not knowing who was going to win the election then, and uncertain what it might mean if a very unusual candidate from the Republican Party won the election.
I remember crystal clear what it felt like to be in a big conference room at a philanthropic organization I was connected to as a member of the board, and the meeting that was underway, given that this organization had a democracy program, was partly about how U.S. democracy might be affected by the election of 2016.
And around the table were a whole bunch of people, many scholars and some people from civil society organizations. There might have even been someone from Carnegie, although that was before I was at Carnegie, and the vibe in the room was generally about why Republicans were going to lose the election.
And there was one voice in the room, one political scientist from a major university, who said, “You know, I have two things to say. The first one is I wouldn’t be quite so sure that the Republicans will lose the election. Let me just start with that. I actually think there’s a very famous person running who’s got a connection to a lot of people all over the country and is pulling people into politics who normally don’t vote.”
But here’s the other piece he said. “I’ve been studying American politics for years,” he said, “and oftentimes the parties find very vigorous things to compete about. But in the last few years, maybe decades, there is a package of policies that the polls, the surveys, suggest many Americans are interested in and neither party has really put those in front of them and that package includes strong limits on immigration, pulling back from international trade and international economic cooperation, a degree of more sort of measured or limited or, you know, progress on cultural type issues or change on cultural issues, maybe even a move back to how things may have been in the past or perceived to be in the past, and a fiscal approach that is not just focused on sort of reducing deficits and increasing the reliability of American debt with the bond market. That package has not been offered to many Americans.”
Fast forward to where we are right now. Now I’m going to answer your question. We have found over the course of the last many years, that even if policy doesn’t drive every outcome in a big democracy, policy does matter and elections have an impact, and right now I would say a major impact of that election that we have just lived through is that part of that list of policies that had not been offered to the American public was a willingness to buck convention and assumptions about international affairs.
So, for example, to potentially put more stress on our alliances with Europe, with South Korea, and also to some degree a willingness to press the uses of American power including economic power—sanctions, threats of tariffs—without at the same time suggesting that there was a priority in actually deploying the U.S. military in the ways that had been commonplace in the last few years.
So if you then add one-third variable, which is that we have a very distinctive president, somebody who at times centralizes decisions very much in the Oval Office and has, perhaps, a more kind of transactional approach to statecraft, then you can expect some pretty straightforward things to play out and they’ve already begun to play out.
The first is a more stressed relationship between Europe and the United States. Europe has been dependent on American military and security guarantees for many decades, and in part for reasons involving financial commitments to military spending, in part because of reasons involving cultural or political differences. This administration is more willing to put those alliances in some stress.
Second, the idea that U.S. international power depended on a certain kind of domestic investment, so think the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS and Science. That is something this administration will probably take a different perspective on. Perhaps they are interested in infrastructure investment but not for the same reasons.
Third, there is a degree of confrontational rhetoric around not only China but other countries that are perceived not to be in sync with the U.S., and a willingness to use threats of suspended visas and of tariffs in ways that are unusual, particularly for an administration this early.
Now, let me end by noting that all of these dramas on the international side—and we haven’t even talked about Ukraine, which is important where, you know, there will be a lot of pressure placed on Ukraine in all likelihood to take positions that will gradually allow for a winding down of the war, perhaps.
The president has indicated that’s what his goal is. But all these things on the international front have to be harmonized with the reality that there is a great deal of uncertainty and intensity around domestic change and controversy around some of the president’s early actions.
Now, often a new president comes in and there’s all kinds of change at the top, but the scale of impacts on civil servants and workers that have either been demoted or, in some cases, fired, efforts to change programmatic priorities in the federal government and, most critically for our discussion, decisions to try to effectively create a norm that gives the president a greater degree of leeway to control and pause federal spending, perhaps going beyond what the law permits. We’ll see what the courts say. That does create a level of disruption and change that I have not seen before in an early presidential administration.
Could there be some good that comes of it? Perhaps. Nobody who believes in the role of government being potentially effective should claim that everything works perfectly in government.
But I also feel like there is a question to my mind about how much the domestic tensions and disagreements and frustrations—you know, the decisions to pull back security details from people who have had credible death threats—whether that will help the U.S. manage its international relationships at a moment where a lot of countries are looking closely at what we’re doing.
And I’ll end just by noting one category of countries, of course, are our allies and partners who wonder about the reliability of our security guarantees in a moment of great domestic change, but then also competitors and adversaries who wonder if this degree of domestic disagreement might ultimately distract the U.S. from a set of strategic priorities globally.
So much more to talk about but let me just end there for the moment.
FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you, Tino, for setting that up for us.
And we’re going to turn to all of you now for your questions and comments.
(Gives queuing instructions.)
So with that, we will go—we already have hands raised. I’m going to go first to Marc Rotenberg. Marc? I think Marc may have put down his hand. OK. Just put down his hand. No, it’s back up. OK, Marc?
Q: OK. Thank you. Nice to see you, Tino. This is Marc Rotenberg from the Center for AI and Digital Policy.
And I know you have spent quite a bit of time over the last several years working on global AI policy and I was wondering if you could share with us some of your initial impressions of what the new administration might bring to the conversation.
CUÉLLAR: Thank you, Marc. Good to hear from you.
So we think quite a bit about AI here at Carnegie. It’s one of the areas we focused on the most because we believe that its potential to have both beneficial impacts around the world but also to complicate various geopolitical issues is profound, and we’ll see how much of that plays out.
Obviously, technology sometimes moves faster and sometimes a little more slowly but we think there’s good reason to think, as I think you do too, Marc, that the pace of change here is profound and raises some interesting statecraft questions for the U.S.
So there’s one aspect of continuity—let me start with that—and that is both the Biden and the Trump administration appear to have strong conviction around the idea that the U.S. should be in a leadership role in this sector, and that even if there’s a good bit of diffusion of the technology as semiconductors get more efficient and the most advanced ones proliferate and some open-weight model releases allow folks in other countries as we’ve begun to see happen, perfect and improve some models at a lower and lower price.
Even if all that is true there will be some work at the frontier—this, I think, is an operating assumption of both administrations—that will require a degree of government policy and support in some way if for no other reason to kind of unleash the innovation piece, but potentially also to reflect the degree of partnership and public engagement around things like national security applications and, you know, what about the energy infrastructure to power all this.
Now, one interesting dimension to my mind about the incoming administration is how much they might have somewhat different quarters, voices, that take different perspectives on exactly what that should mean in practice.
There is clearly a Silicon Valley-affiliated faction that, to some degree, believes that the less any limits are set on AI development or proliferation the better. There’s a different group that believes that there may be some credible evidence that some of the Llama releases from Meta that are open-weight have been used, including in the Chinese context for national security applications in those countries, and that means that plus concerns about the proliferation of semiconductors means there should be real limits on those semiconductors, notwithstanding the rhetoric right now that the DeepSeek model coming from China may have found a way to get pretty sophisticated without using some of those high-end semiconductors. That’s an open question.
But then there’s a third voice here, which is Elon Musk, and, you know, let me use that to just note that one of the other interesting dimensions in this administration is that there’s certainly been important high-level business people close to administrations in the past but perhaps this is a somewhat unusual degree of closeness, and the extent to which personal agendas, national security agendas, national competitiveness agendas sometimes get harder and harder to disentangle will be important to watch.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to go next to a raised hand from—sorry, I’m flipping between screens here—Stockton University.
Q: Hello. Good afternoon.
My question is with the new administration and all the new candidate nominees do you believe we’ll possibly look stronger internationally or would there be judgment amongst other countries, possibly calling us an oligarchy?
CUÉLLAR: Thank you for your question.
I think one thing about your premise that I think is important and I think is right is that what’s domestic is international and what’s international is domestic, and you don’t have to even go to issues like immigration to highlight that connection between, say, transnational flows of people or weapons or ideas and what’s happening domestically.
And in particular I think it’s fair to say that when you look back and think about moments like the Kennedy inauguration in 1961, there was a very vigorous recognition in just about every part of that inaugural speech from Kennedy that the whole world was watching the U.S.
We were in the middle of a vigorous and dynamic and difficult competitive struggle for advantage in the Cold War and what we did to accommodate international students or to invest in and help countries grow around the world or even to get our own house in order was all going to reflect on the U.S. globally.
So with that in mind, I would say the really interesting question is how we define strong, right? Because there is one state of the world where strength is the willingness to say to a country if you don’t accept military planes landing with lots of folks the U.S. is removing to your country then we’re going to impose certain sanctions.
But sometimes strength can be measured in a different way. It’s about the strength of your brand and your ideas, about how much people want to be American, how much they want to come here from around the world, how much they feel inspired about what we do and, you know, how much they believe that our basic economic model is one that’s viable that would work elsewhere in the world.
In the end, the most important component of strength is the ability to keep our country secure. But I suspect that one of the real challenges in the next couple of years will be balancing this notion of strength as a way of engaging the public and inspiring the public abroad and then having a more harder and more narrow definition of strength, and I suspect in this administration perhaps the latter will be more prominent.
But we ought to remember that we have won a very special position around the world not only because of our military strength, and preserving that special position will take more than military and economic power.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’ll take the next question written from Steven Jones at Georgia Gwinnett College: How do you expect the president to maintain the Hamas-Israel ceasefire?
CUÉLLAR: With a good bit of luck and support and help from both Israel but also its adversaries, and to be clear it’s impossible to talk about what happened and what is happening in Israel without acknowledging the sheer brutality and horror of the original attacks.
But, of course, in what’s played out since those attacks, there have been a great many situations where relations between Israel and its neighbors have grown quite complicated and contentious, and right now it seems to me that part of the challenge is that there is always a degree of ambiguity and instability built into these dynamics, and as more hostages ideally get saved there will also be potentially more incentive among some factions to sabotage and complicate the deal on the Hamas side for sure.
But I also think it’s important to recognize that Israel is a very tumultuous place right now politically, perhaps understandably so. You’ve got the prime minister. You’ve got this fragile coalition. You’ve got the opposition. You’ve got the families of the hostages who are left behind. You’ve got uncertainty about, you know, some of the hostages that are not included in the deal yet.
Meanwhile, you’ve got a great deal of American efforts to try to cement the deal with Saudi Arabia eventually. That has implications for what Saudi Arabia might expect in terms of progress on the Palestinian issue. So that’s a long way of saying that I think it will take a lot of nuance and attention to details and, you know, one cannot expect the logic of the deal to hold by itself.
But I do think that if the U.S. takes a bigger picture perspective on the region, then having some broader security framework or architecture that includes, perhaps, a clearer sense of where the Gulf states fit in and some credible measures on the part of Israel to think about how this plays out over the next five to ten years, all of that will help.
FASKIANOS: Yes. And just to note, Benjamin Netanyahu, I think, has been invited to visit the White House next week so we’ll keep an eye out for that.
I’m going to go next to Mojúbàolú Okome, please.
Q: Good afternoon.
I am just puzzled about the statecraft aspect of your talk. How is any of these policies, actions, and even presidential behavior adding up as a coherent strategy in statecraft?
CUÉLLAR: That’s a great question. We have an American statecraft program here at Carnegie that thinks about that full time and so they are right now, I think, asking themselves a similar question.
Let me take a step back and note that there is always a gap between visions of the role of the United States around the world, or any country, and how messy it is to implement all of that. So I might start maybe to answer your question by noting three important imperatives that the U.S. has had historically as a core element of what I would describe its sort of approach to international relations and to its role in the world, and then one might ask how well is this moment and this whole mix of policies serving those three goals.
The first is to secure its sphere of most direct influence, and that includes particularly the Western Hemisphere and to keep that safe, and in that process the U.S. has been helped enormously by the giant oceans that protect it from other territories.
But the advent of advanced technology—cyber or digital weapons—has complicated that, among other things.
The second is to create a world that is relatively friendly to and compatible with democracies. That doesn’t have to mean that every last country has to live up to the ideals of democracy as defined by the United States, but it means that it has been a recurring part of U.S. statecraft even in the Cold War when the U.S. often looked the other way at all kinds of abuses and did plenty of business with countries that were not democracies.
But in general there has been a push, and I would, again, associate this a little bit with some of the rhetoric in the 1961 Kennedy inaugural and so on, to make sure democracy has a role in the world.
And then the third is to allow for the world to be robustly connected economically so that American goods and services can be sold and the U.S. can import things, and we can argue back and forth about when that’s been good, when that’s not been good.
I think at this moment we are seeing, perhaps, an effort to shift basic American statecraft in a somewhat different direction, one that more heavily focuses on enhancing the ability of the United States to project power in different ways for a variety of goals, perhaps some of them related to what I just said as the historical foundations of, you know, recent modern statecraft but, perhaps, for other reasons, too.
And I guess one implicit question I have to, you know, reinforce what is tricky right now is whether one can truly expect that agenda of enhancing American power to be compatible with the benefits the U.S. has achieved from the order that it has invested in in the past, which is more multilateral, which is more focused on international economic cooperation, somewhat more focused on promoting democracy in some way.
And I don’t know that ultimately all the goals can be harmonized but I do think—the last point I’ll make is that any coherent statecraft project, whether it’s the one that I described that I would associate with, you know, George H.W. Bush, Obama, et cetera, and the more current one can be sustained without some degree of domestic coherence and a robust domestic coalition, and that we’ll have to see because a lot of infighting and disagreements and court battles can make any grand strategy difficult.
FASKIANOS: I’m going next to João Vítor Prado, and excuse me if I’ve mispronounced your name. You can correct me. If you accept the unmute—there we go.
Q: There we go.
CUÉLLAR: There we go.
FASKIANOS: There we go. And give us your affiliation, please.
CUÉLLAR: Affiliation, please.
Q: Thank you. Yes. My name is João Prado. I’m with CIFE, European Institute.
And I’m wondering, Trump has been making a lot of propositions and far-reaching promises on solving many foreign affairs issues and foreign conflicts and at the same time we’re seeing that a lot of his policy propositions are towards economic protectionism and the reduction of the size of the federal government as well.
I don’t know if that will take some Foreign Service personnel with him but I’m wondering how that’s going to leave the United States in the international stage especially in comparison to the effects that Russia and China can have on regional politics of the Middle East and of Asia, for example.
Thank you.
CUÉLLAR: Let me build on your excellent question.
I’ll also point out Southeast Asia, which is one of the most interesting and important and consequential regions of the world right now, if you think about competitive dynamics between the U.S. and China, if you also think just about the general direction of development, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, that incredibly diverse region of hundreds of millions of people I think is a great example of where the question of how effectively can the U.S. offer the technology stack that it wants to, the economic relationships that it wants to have the degree of leverage and influence that it wants to have, without some more international economic cooperation. Without a trade agenda, for example, that is an open question for me. I think that will be hard.
And to build on this point, I want to just take a historical perspective and talk about the Cold War. There is a lot that went into positioning the U.S. to effectively pursue and eventually win the Cold War.
We have to remember that the truly extraordinary achievement, in a sense, of the Soviets was to have a much different and in many ways weaker economic framework and still to effectively achieve strategic parity with the U.S. for a while, at least.
But part of what was critical to the Cold War, I would argue, was a robust degree of domestic investment and state capacity, so capacity to teach and learn languages, to field expert Foreign Service officers, to build highways, to develop advanced technology and so on, but also a willingness to develop robust trading relationships with countries all over the world, in some cases in situations that were not completely equal U.S. and these other countries but in the opposite direction that we’re going in right now, which is to say for the sake of building up economic partners and helping them be the key allies that the U.S. needed strategically.
That meant that if there was some degree of asymmetry in trade with South Korea that was OK and if it was easier for South Korea to sell things in the U.S. than for the U.S. to sell things in South Korea we accepted that to some degree.
So we are now in a situation where I suspect that as the U.S. tries to enhance its relationships and it does not have quite the economic carrot to cover—to offer in the same way I think it will turn out to be a harder conversation and one that will require attention to some other forms of statecraft.
But in the end I think what we’ll realize is that we can’t quite have our cake and eat it, too. If we want economic relationships to pull the world towards us around technology, around frameworks of governance, then we can’t rely too much on an overly restrictionist framework.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m taking the next written question from Susan Page from her University of Michigan public policy class: Given how much from an American perspective new technologies have often flourished from unforeseen uses by individuals and firms, do you expect the policy of this coming—incoming administration as it regards AI to have any positive impacts on encouraging diverse uses among Americans?
CUÉLLAR: Thank you.
I think there was continued interest in the upside of AI and I think that can have beneficial impacts in some ways by symbolically and just rhetorically urging people not to be purely fearful about the technology.
But, you know, there have been some comments including from folks inside the administration that argue that the Biden era executive order that was trying to set up a reporting relationship such that certain testing results from certain very advanced frontier models could be shared with the U.S. government and that that was somehow interfering with innovation, and I am not persuaded. I don’t think that’s credible.
I think at the end of the day for the most part the past administration as well as the current one is encouraging a degree of innovation. But I do think, looking ahead, an important piece in making sure those benefits actually materialize is keeping some attention for the potential backlash that might come from concerns about national security—if the technology is used in ways that can damage U.S. security by empowering less technologically sophisticated U.S. adversaries, for example, they have more advanced weapon systems or cyber exploits, maybe even to facilitate in pretty interesting and dramatic ways the development of certain biological agents now that DNA sequencing is easier—as well as potential backlash that can eventually come from people who are facing job losses in segments of the economy that are not manufacturing but that are actually deep into the professional service sector class.
Now, I think that any administration—Biden, Trump, whomever—will have to grapple with those risks of backlash because continued progress will depend on keeping a degree of public support for technological innovation. And ideally, that will mean a win-win where workers become more productive, where U.S. national security gets enhanced, where more innovative uses end up getting diffused around the world dealing with sustainable agriculture, with education, with medical care. But a lot will have to go into figuring out how to make that pathway work.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Gil Sander Joseph, an undergraduate student at Princeton.
Q: Hello. Yes, my name is Gil and I’m from Haiti. I’m enrolled at Princeton.
My question is about—you know, there’s been sort of like reports that the U.S. is trying to establish a partnership with El Salvador on sort of, like, mirroring a certain model that was used by—that the UK was trying to use where it would kind of, like, migration—sort of, like, enforcement but outside of the U.S. borders, and I think there was a report that the U.S. was trying to do—to deport some Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador because Venezuela would not accept some of those. And I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that, whether that’s viable and how likely that is actually to happen.
CUÉLLAR: Thank you. I think migration will be a very important topic in the next few years. It was in the previous administration but it’s going to get even more important for a lot of reasons including, you know, the American people voted for an administration that wants to ramp up enforcement in immigration and also the pressures that are encouraging migration are only going to continue to grow in many respects.
I mean, even before we get into climate impacts over the next few years just simply what happens as war, pandemics, risks of civil conflict, government instability, economic instability, all these factors exacerbate migration pressures.
So, in the end, I think that any administration that wants to be responsible has to realize that migration is a shared responsibility and a hemispheric one. Most of the irregular migration into the U.S. is based in some way in the Western Hemisphere but it’s important to realize not all of it.
People come on visas and then overstay those visas, too. But to the extent that we are concerned about flows of irregular migration in the Western Hemisphere step one is to gradually pull countries together and make more of them allies in controlling irregular migration.
Now, the Los Angeles declaration that started under the previous administration took a big step in that direction by creating a whole set of plans and frameworks and funding relationships that would get the Colombias and the Panamas and the Mexicos of the world to be a little bit more on the same page about controlling irregular migration.
But the second piece is going to be to understand that if we take seriously the goals of controlling migration but doing so in a way that is compatible with American values and with being humanitarians and so on that there ought to be a strategy that’s not just about the border, that has to think about the economic conditions of countries around the hemisphere—that’s, again, another reason why trade is important—that builds the right law enforcement cooperation, that builds the right diplomatic cooperation to deal with mass migration emergencies so that we’re not dealing with it all in the Caribbean or, you know, at the U.S.-Mexico border.
And that will take productive relationships with countries around the hemisphere and it will take recognition that they also have a set of needs and concerns that if taken somewhat seriously can best serve American interests.
I think it will be an open question how much this administration will take an approach like that. This administration has clearly signaled interest in the Western Hemisphere. That can include both a comprehensive strategy to grow the economies of countries around the hemisphere in a way that will benefit the U.S. because this region is really the core of American power.
But it could also mean more contentious relationships in irregular kinds of operations so we’ll have to watch.
FASKIANOS: So I’m going to take the next written question from Stephanie Hallock: If the U.S. no longer holds up the structure and philosophy of the current liberal world order that it created, that order will fail and another will step in to fill the power vacuum. Historically, that involves a war between the primary players. Do you think it is possible for the world order to evolve without it?
CUÉLLAR: That’s a really interesting question. Can you remind me who that came from again?
FASKIANOS: That came from Stephanie Hallock and she is at Harford Community College.
CUÉLLAR: Terrific. I love the question because it lets me both recognize that the U.S. has had a big impact on the world following World War II in building a framework for global relations, and notwithstanding the Cold War I think it’s fair to say that the U.S. was really the pivotal actor in building that.
But it also helps me reinforce that—Stephanie, that that liberal world order was never perfect in two ways. It was never slavishly and perfectly followed. There were deviations from it at times—relationships involving trade that were not what they could be, contentious experiences inside the IMF and the World Bank and, you know, fights over the WTO.
So globally there was still fighting and questions about implementation around what that arrangement truly meant. Conversely, domestically there were many, many countries that felt a domestic backlash as the world integrated more economically, and found that sometimes what might be net-net in the benefit of a particular country or set of countries might not always be beneficial for particular constituencies, whether agricultural or focused on textile or manufacturing or whatever.
The backlash to those reactions or those changes in global economic relationships is part of what ultimately has contributed to a strain on the democratic and, you know, civic space in advanced industrialized countries to the extent to which, you know, there’s a relative degree of predictability and domestic peace on the kind of civic front or whether there are new alliances and coalitions that are forming, many of them much more skeptical of trade.
I think the U.S. is fairly essential but I also believe we are going to enter a period of countries engaging in new approaches to try to build coalitions that support certain values and certain outcomes. So I would watch closely leading democracies that are in emerging and developing regions of the world so think Brazil. Think India.
I’d watch the European Union closely on how it reacts to a period where U.S. leadership on these issues may be less reliable. I’d watch the democracies of East Asia like Japan and South Korea.
And I don’t dispute the premise that the U.S. is still key but for a while I think it will be important to find other pathways to move forward on some of these agendas, and I also would watch U.S. states. It’s worth remembering that on issues that are not too far from that internationalist framework with a degree of domestic concern, too, you get states like California that might want to be a part of a coalition.
FASKIANOS: I’m going to go next to María Carla Chicuén.
Q: Thank you very much.
My question was regarding policies that impact minorities in the U.S. In the president’s acceptance speech we hear an acknowledgement of the Hispanic, you know, and Black communities in the U.S., for example. You know, at the same time recent executive actions and rhetoric from the administration regarding immigration and DEI have also, you know, sort of brought minorities under more negative lights. How do you interpret the actual goals of the current administration with regards to minorities?
FASKIANOS: And María is with—from Miami Dade College.
Q: Correct. Thank you, Irina.
CUÉLLAR: It’s a great question.
I don’t know. I think it’s hard to tell and I can’t fully decode everything happening inside the administration. But let me see if I can connect three ideas.
The first one is that there’s no question that the incoming administration believes itself to have a mandate to slow down or roll back what we could call cultural change. So whether it’s from a civil rights perspective and how people of an LGBTQIA background sort of fare or questions about the treatment of immigrants are sort of like a different set of goals, maybe, you know, questions about the value of a diverse workforce, there’s an agenda to roll back or at least slow down the pace of change on that score.
A second critical point is that, remarkably enough, the coalitions that support both major political parties have been evolving, and particularly with this election, such that there is less concentration of people of an ethnic or racial minority background in one party.
There are still more African-American Democrats than Republicans but there is a growing fraction of the Republican coalition that supported the president who are Black, a substantially growing chunk who are Latino, and that is telling. And, you know, I would say it is probably in many—in the books—you know, from the perspective of many people a good thing that there’s a degree of competition for some of these communities and they’re not completely insular.
But the third idea is that the coalition that is therefore supporting the president is a little divided on these issues and it’s important to take that into account. No matter how much power one thinks that a single individual has, whether he’s the president or somebody else, the reality of almost everything in our politics is that coalitions matter and disagreements in factions can matter, and you saw a little early taste of that, María, in the back and forth between Elon Musk and others all supporting the president but disagreeing about the role of temporary worker visas—H-1B visas—and I would not be surprised if that were really a proxy for a larger set of disagreements about the role of some of the issues that you’re bringing up in the administration right now.
So, to sum up, there was some backlash in this administration to cultural change but also a more diverse coalition, and that will result in some hard questions inside that coalition about how they harmonize competing values.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
So I’m going to combine a couple of questions from Allyn Taylor at University of Washington and Assad Raza of Troy University looking at the U.S. or the withdrawal from global health cooperation by withdrawing from WHO and the Paris climate agreement and the effect that you think that this will have of—on us domestically and internationally.
CUÉLLAR: So in a democracy one has to—in a democracy that tries to be responsive to the long-term needs of its people, it has to reconcile two things.
One is that the public may frequently not understand or value multilateral arrangements or collaborative efforts with other countries, but at the same time that a responsible, thoughtful leadership strategy almost always ends up pushing a powerful country to work with others in order to build the right relationships to tackle common problems.
So the impact of a changing climate, the risks from pandemics, questions involving how to respond to giant disasters of different kinds that can create mass-migration emergencies, the maintenance of the international economic system, the maintenance of a free and open set of pathways for maritime exchange to keep the oceans safe, like, these are all things that benefit directly and affect Americans, like what we do to handle these issues, and cannot be done without some degree of cooperation—perhaps with U.S. leadership or sometimes with a change in emphasis and push back on what this or that multilateral organization wants to do. But as a matter of, like, can you represent and effectively advance American interests without some degree of cooperation around the world, really hard to argue that you can completely go it alone.
So, I think that these moments of withdrawal from these international arrangements reflect the tension between the two points that I’ve made. You know, will a lot of the American public care either way? No.
And the ones that do care, will some of them be happy that this withdrawal happened? Many will, and if you add up the ones that don’t care and the ones that think this is a good thing then you end up with a very large chunk, I suspect, of the American public.
But as a matter of what is good for the country—leaving aside what I just said, what is actually good for the country, you know, I hope the U.S. finds other pathways to collaborate with countries to prevent and mitigate the impact of pandemics.
We’ll have to see. I hope and expect that the U.S. will see not only that climate change is a real driver of lack of U.S. prosperity and real ecological impact in the West, but is actually driving a giant industrial change around the world around transportation, around electrification, around cleaner power, and if the U.S. doesn’t want to be left behind, then the U.S. will have some work to do.
So, to my mind it is important to separate out what it is that people want from sometimes what is actually in the interest of a country.
FASKIANOS: Mmm hmm. Thank you.
Let’s go to Marcus Banks-Bey next at Liberty University. I think, Marcus—
Q: Am I unmuted?
FASKIANOS: Oh, OK. Great.
Q: OK.
FASKIANOS: You are unmuted, yes.
Q: OK. Thank you. I also put my question in the chat, so I didn’t know which was next.
So, my question is so with my policy analysis I have constructed an algorithmic AI framework that predicts that the U.S. in its likelihood will reach a stabilization or a destabilization and that likelihood is about 76 percent, and the administration compromises is about 73 percent. The domestic terrorism cascade is 77 percent. And with that, my question is will the dollar survive or will the U.S. be absorbed into a new economic regional policy?
CUÉLLAR: That’s really interesting, Marcus. I’ve long been interested in how computers and algorithms and information technology can help us decode and understand what’s happening around the world but also what the limitations are, and it’s interesting to hear that you’re experimenting with this.
I guess my general reaction is that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency and that has many origins. Some of it is path-dependent. Some of it reflects the sheer strength of the American economy, the desirability of the U.S. as a destination for different kinds of capital.
And, in the end, you know, generally speaking, when there’s more international tumult and uncertainty there’s even more interest in the dollar, not less. But let me, you know, in a way, take your question as an invitation to just note that there are so many reasons why the moments that we’re living through right now are strange and different.
Every moment is different, right? Every administration can rightly think, well, I’m starting this administration at an unprecedented moment in history, and every inaugural address has a little bit of feel for that.
But if I start to add up the amount of geopolitical fragmentation and disruption, for example, the major competitor of the U.S. is a country the U.S. is deeply economically embedded with, and I add to that the speed of technological change, maybe including some of the stuff you’re playing around with and using, and then if I add to that the level of domestic uncertainty around what’s happening right now, it feels to me like we can rightly ask, like, what might be very different from what we expect in just three or four years.
So, I think this will take some stress modeling and analysis inside the government. Having worked inside government a number of times, I can tell you some of that work is underway, and I think it’s good to sort of think about scenarios that might seem not quite black and white but gray, like, a little bit uncertain, not sure exactly where they land.
What happens if a country we think of as very stable becomes very unstable? What happens if certain bedrock assumptions we make about the U.S. economy suddenly prove completely unfounded?
So, I welcome that line of thinking and I think it’s incumbent for all of us to take it seriously.
FASKIANOS: I’m going to take the next written question from Alexis Smith. The Minnesota State University’s U.S. foreign policy class has written this question: Could focusing on American interests at the expense of global partnerships embolden rivals like China and Russia? Also, does an “America First” policy risk compromising America’s historical role as a defender of human rights and democracy worldwide?
CUÉLLAR: Thank you. So let me focus in particular on the second part of the question.
There’s no period in our history where you could say the U.S. has always lived a hundred percent up to its values. So, we can have a discussion about the values of the U.S., but even when we have values articulated about human rights and democracy, we don’t always quite live up to it.
I see that as somebody who’s very proud to be an American, who chose to be an American, who naturalized in this country, and I do feel like for all the imperfections and moments where we haven’t always been at our best in history, we’ve also made some pretty remarkable contributions to the world, including the role we played to anchor discussions of things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundations of a lot of international law in the modern era, and a lot of that will have to be anchored in a strategy and an approach that is not all based on the U.S.
That doesn’t mean that the U.S. will be irrelevant to this. I think you will see that this administration will care plenty about, for example, international religious freedom, which is an important element of the U.S. commitment to human rights.
But I hope and expect—and we’ll have to see—that gradually there will be a better and better recognition that, yes, it’s true the U.S. sometimes has to deal with countries and take into account values other than simply human rights and democracy, but that there are goals involving international stability, economic prosperity, and the values and well-being of Americans that are all well served by taking human rights and democracy seriously.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to go next to Mia Bloom.
Q: Hi. I’m Mia Bloom. I’m from Georgia State University.
This has happened just this week. So there’s been a chilling effect on academic research because the president has decided to suspend research funding from a number of agencies, and I guess the question would be is Carnegie in the position to pick up the slack or at least for some of the subjects that we know are never going to be funded again—January 6 or right-wing extremism or school safety related to gun violence. Does Carnegie have the bandwidth to step into that void?
CUÉLLAR: Thank you.
We have to start by recognizing that we have a lane, and that lane is global affairs that are related to international cooperation, conflict, and governance. That’s already a lot. That encompasses everything ranging from democracy to nuclear to Russia and Ukraine to U.S.-China relations to India’s growth to Europe to climate and to global order and institutions.
But I’ll start by just noting no matter what the administration, no matter what the moment, we can’t cover every single issue but, broadly speaking, issues around geopolitical disruption, the emergence and development of different regions around the world that are becoming more influential and important economically and geopolitically, and governance and technology that will stay front and center for Carnegie.
I do think it’s important for civil society to recognize that part of our responsibility is to be true to our missions, and those missions are generally served by intellectual honesty as well as pragmatism.
It’s one thing to make sure that we hear from every quarter, that we’re in regular dialogue with people who disagree with our scholars. We don’t take institutional positions but our scholars and our work has certain themes that reinforce, for example, the importance of international cooperation.
But it’s important for us to be in contact with people who disagree with even that premise about the importance of international cooperation, whatever administration they are or are not a part of.
That said, we have to be able to be clear and honest about what our scholars are seeing, what we view as concerning, what we view as potentially complicating and retrogressing in terms of advancing American and global interests.
So, to my mind, I think the key is to stick to the core areas we have but then to be very steadfast in pursuing that mission and that is going to mean that sometimes what you might have been hearing from the government and then from an external organization like Carnegie you’re now just going to hear from an external organization.
But in some ways, ironically, I feel like that reinforces the importance of our mission right now. We have never been only about getting this or that meeting with a government official or briefing policy makers only. We do that. We’ll continue to do that.
But it’s also about helping the world narrate and understand what’s happening, and that requires honesty.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to go next to a written question from Nicole Mbuse, who is a political science student at Suffolk University: What do you anticipate will happen through executive action in the next four years and what will it do to separation of powers?
We’ve seen President Trump’s efforts to change employees’ status as civil servants who work for the government. Will this use of executive action in this scenario undermine his ability to have a productive term in office with employees who know what does and doesn’t work?
And if I can extend that question, we’re going to see a lot of action in the courts pushing back. How much will that hamper his efforts or his time in office as well?
CUÉLLAR: Thank you.
I, first, support the premise of the question. There is a lot to be said for separated powers. As Justice Kennedy liked to say, the splitting of the atom of sovereignty that we achieved in the U.S. two ways, between federalism—you know, because of federalism between the federal government and the states but also across these branches, right?
I think there is a clear effort underway to take what has often been an effort to set a few new key priorities in implementing existing laws because you have to remember that’s the core of the president’s power. To take care the laws be faithfully executed means to make sure that implementation follows a broad understanding of what is faithful to the law, generally.
But there’s some of that and it is going beyond that now to tightly try to control government and its operations—what these agencies do, how they do it, with whom they do it, who is employed there, et cetera.
So there will be more of that. There will be more efforts if and when courts block one piece of this to try to get around it. If that doesn’t work to try to find other ways to, in the end, get people that are preferred by the administration and are supportive of the administration’s agenda in positions of influence inside government, way beyond just the limit of political appointees that Congress has decided to have.
Whether you view that as very problematic or not depends a lot on where you stand. But it is not typical, just to be clear. That’s not what an incoming administration normally does, Democratic or Republican.
So these efforts to instill a sense that if you’re working in the federal government at any level of responsibility, even if you’re a civil servant, you’ve got to have to—you have to kind of be aligned with the White House that’s unusual.
I think the most important separation of powers battle in the near term, and probably it will play out over several chapters including in the medium term, is about money. Let me explain why.
Take this order that is now purporting to offer federal workers a way out from working in federal government in exchange for kind of a big severance package of some kind. Well, does the president have the authority to do that?
Well, that’s an excellent question. The short answer is it depends to some extent not only on how you see civil service laws but how you see the president’s ability to say, you know what, we’re not going to spend money on what Congress said, which was having these agencies do this. We’re going to spend it, effectively, on having people not work on that and leave. That’s a way of spending money that may not be consistent exactly with the law.
So where does that lead? It leads to the courts, Irina, to your point, and, ultimately, the key question the courts will have to face is does this strategy to tightly control spending—in some cases in contravention of pretty straightforward congressional laws, based on some theory of executive power—is that going to stick or not.
And the reason the stakes around that are so high is because over the last hundred years it’s fair to say you’ve generally seen with some exceptions but generally seen a flow of power away from Congress and towards the presidency for a lot of reasons we can talk about.
What has been the exception to that? Money. Congress’ critical role, at the end of the day, is the power of the purse. It’s why you have these appropriations committees with a lot of power, sometimes micromanaging exactly how particular federal dollars are spent.
But whether you love that micromanaging or not, the reality is that is the way the modern Congress has power. It’s been really interesting to see Republicans in Congress right now, at least at the top level like the Mike Johnsons of the world, saying, you know, the president has this power.
That’s an open question legally, I would say, but more fundamentally as a matter of what is good for the American project of self-government, I would say letting the president have the degree of executive power that the president is trying to gain and tighten and, like, you know, over federal workers and, on top of that, being able to control money is not something that will likely lead to outcomes that are easy to sort of harmonize with the American tradition, I would say.
FASKIANOS: Yeah, and there’s so many questions still left. I’m sorry we can’t get to them.
But I was hoping you could just leave us with the article that you wrote in Foreign Affairs about how federalism can prevent tyranny at the top and just some of your key recommendations for what you see needs to happen on the federal level to counter or balance whatever’s happening at the top.
CUÉLLAR: Thank you. Well, let me start by just acknowledging that I hope that I’ve come across as somebody who’s tried to be balanced here. I started by noting that elections have consequences. There ought to be policy change in response to who won the election. You ought not to expect the same policies from President Trump as you got from President Biden.
That said, I think what gets a little trickier—and this gets to the article—is there are some things that really shift policy and there are some things that ultimately rewire expectations about how does government fundamentally work, and some of that really gets to, you know, how much of that rewiring of how government fundamentally works is consistent with the American project.
I think right now we’re in a space where we’ll have to wait and see. You know, the courts have not ruled on a lot of things. There was a degree of change that one might have expected. But what if things get more complicated?
Like, what if there is a president, the current one or maybe a future one of any party, that takes a court decision from the U.S. Supreme Court and says, you know what, let the court enforce it.
We’re simply going to ignore this and, you know, if people want to drag us to court maybe we’ll change the policy with respect to one human being, one person. But for the rest we’re just going to ignore the court decision.
And whenever that moment comes, whether it comes in the next few years or in the next few decades, there is an important safeguard which is that the United States is not a unified government. It is a federation of different states that have a set of political traditions and constitutional powers that are not all flowing from the federal government.
They’re flowing from the Constitution and, ultimately, the people, which is why federal courts rule on interpreting federal statutes but state courts do, too. State courts are bound to follow the Constitution, to rule on the U.S. Constitution, and if the federal government increasingly begins to operate in ways that are hard to justify from a constitutional perspective, states can respond to that in a way other than simply taking as a given that what they’re instructed to do by the federal government is the right thing.
And in noting why that’s been important I would note that many, many Supreme Court justices over the last fifty years—many of them appointed by Republicans, some appointed by Democrats—have ruled on the side of federalism.
So that is the world we’re in and I think it’d be important to watch how much those limits set by courts and set by the federal structure are honored.
FASKIANOS: Tino, thank you very much for being with us today. We really appreciate it. This has been a terrific hour and thanks to all of you for your questions. I apologize again for not being able to get to all of them. Very overwhelming.
So we appreciate it and we’ll just have to have you back.
CUÉLLAR: Thank you. I look forward to it, and thank you for the great questions from the audience and from you, Irina.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
And the next Global Affairs Expert Webinar will be on Wednesday, February 5 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Adam Segal, the Ira Lipman chair in emerging technologies and national security, will lead a conversation on how tech firms shape geopolitics.
So, I hope you can join us for that. I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers.
Follow us at @CFR_education and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues and, of course, you can go to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Tino’s organization, to access a lot of wonderful resources there as well.
Thank you all for being with us and we look forward to seeing you again on February 5.
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