SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Regardless of who wins this week's election - or next week's, rather - a new presidential administration will enter the White House next year, and it will have many foreign policy challenges to address - wars in the Middle East, Europe and Africa, mass migration and climate change. The next president will also inherit a changing world order, one in which the U.S. will play less of a leading role. One former State Department official says he or she will need to adapt and quickly.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is the former director of policy planning in the U.S. State Department. She recently wrote about this in Foreign Affairs in a piece called "How America Can Succeed In A Multialigned World." Slaughter argues the next president needs to move away from a statist approach, where U.S. diplomacy focuses on other nation states, and to really tackle global problems, U.S. diplomacy needs to also include different types of global actors.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: What we're talking about are global corporations, global civic organizations. If you think about the humanitarian organizations from CARE to Mercy Corps to Doctors Without Borders, you can't really imagine a global crisis without them.
DETROW: Yeah.
SLAUGHTER: But also scientists, universities, and indeed faith groups - and those are global actors, but they are not states. And that's what I'm talking about is that it's not that we give up on states. Obviously, states are still very important, but the global stage has many other very important, powerful actors in addition to states.
DETROW: What's changed about the world to make these organizations so much more important?
SLAUGHTER: That's a great question. I think, in many ways, the world has gotten smaller in the sense that even in the '90s, after the Cold War, the same forces that brought us globalization of corporations, where suddenly, corporations could be global entities, not just having national subsidiaries, which had been around for a long time - but global supply chains and instant global communication. And so in many ways, it's the same. Those forces of globalization which we saw with corporations, we've seen with many other actors, and we increasingly have global problems.
DETROW: You're arguing that the next president needs to, along with their administration, really engage with these nonstate actors more, these organizations more. You make a point that you think the Harris administration would be much more likely to do that than another Trump administration. Why do you think that?
SLAUGHTER: Former President Trump has worked with corporations globally, but his administration was focused on countries, on other governments, and only a few other governments at that, not a true focus on all the 193 nations or even 100 of them. I think a President Harris or Vice President Harris is very aware that there are multiple categories of problems. There are the geopolitical problems, where we've got Russia and China and Iran and North Korea. These are the kinds of traditional, what we call, geopolitical threats. She knows how important those are.
But she also knows - and this is something that was really a historic move by the Biden administration - that these problems of climate change and infectious disease and food and water security and terrorism and migration - those global problems, problems without passports that don't stop at borders - those problems are just as important as those traditional threats from other nations. And when you need to tackle those problems, you've got to have the private sector, the civic sector, the educational and the scientific sector alongside you. And I think that's a framework that she's quite comfortable with.
DETROW: It's been more of a domestic policy election than a foreign policy election, but, you know, the big foreign policy questions have revolved around the ongoing war in Ukraine, the ongoing war in Gaza and now Lebanon and with Israel. There's been conversation about China as well.
Setting those big three things aside, which I realize is setting a lot aside, what to you is the biggest area where we would see a wildly different policy difference between a Harris administration and in a Trump administration when you're looking around the globe at these big issues and what the stakes of the election are?
SLAUGHTER: Oh, unquestionably on climate change.
DETROW: Yeah.
SLAUGHTER: Trump will pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement again, but more importantly, he will not pursue efforts to fund emissions reductions, mitigation, adaptation. The head of the CIA, Bill Burns, says climate change is the No. 1 existential threat. Existential, meaning to our existence - and that is certainly something a Harris administration would continue. And it's a great example of a place where you need really global partnerships. The U.S., though, would be still a very active player, but under a Trump administration, it would no longer be at the federal level.
DETROW: I want to ask you, lastly, a - kind of a purposely oversimplified question, so stick with me on the question. But you're framing the world as one where the U.S. just plays a less central role in world affairs than it did before. One of your quotes is, Washington does not need to lead every initiative to facilitate the change it wants to see in the world.
What is the difference between that point of view and the America First isolationism that you have seen from Trump and especially his running mate, Senator JD Vance, about how they talk about America's role in the world and the choices the next administration would make?
SLAUGHTER: I think I'm talking about leading in a different way because I say, yes, we don't have to lead all the time to see the change we want in the world. We can cede it instead. So part of what I'm talking about there is enabling these global partnerships of governments - often governments of quite small nations, corporations, of scientists, of civic groups - and that if you cede and support those partnerships, they will get the work done, particularly if they adopt very specific missions.
The difference with the America First view is that leadership itself is a burden, and we should simply shuck that burden. I think many people who take that view might well see the kind of global partnerships I'm talking about as fine because it's not the federal government leading them. But the impulse is very different. The impulse is the U.S. should just retreat from the world, whereas what I'm proposing is to tackle global issues through much wider global partnerships and a lighter hand and a willingness sometimes to step back, to let others step forward.
DETROW: Anne-Marie Slaughter, the CEO of New America, a think tank in Washington, as well as a former State Department official. You can read her essay, "How America Can Succeed In A Multialigned World," in Foreign Affairs. Thanks so much for joining us.
SLAUGHTER: It's always a pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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