There are less than thirty days left until the presidential election. The stakes in the United States could not be higher. But what about the geopolitical stakes? We are a center for international affairs, so we are very much interested in the ramifications of the upcoming election for geopolitics.
KRISTIN CAULFIELD: Great. Now I turn the event over to Professor Melani Cammett, Director of the Weatherhead Center.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Thank you so much, Kristin, and welcome everyone to the Weatherhead Forum, which is the platform of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs to address pressing topics of the day. And as I'm sure you're well aware, we have less than 30 days left until the presidential election. The stakes in the United States could not be higher.
But what about the geopolitical stakes? We are a center for international affairs, so we are very much interested in the ramifications of the upcoming election for geopolitics. And today, we're very lucky to be joined by four experts in diverse global regions who are going to discuss the implications of the US election in the Middle East, Latin America, Russia, and China.
So for today's format, each speaker is going to present briefly, about 10 minutes, and then I'm going to pose some questions to the group. And then we'll turn to the Q&A. You're all invited to submit questions in the Q&A function. And I'll try to get to as many of them as possible and may end up grouping some of them if they're similar.
So let me briefly introduce the speakers for today. First, we have Ziad Daoud, who is Senior Fellow with The Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He is also the Chief Emerging Markets Economist at Bloomberg. Prior to that, he was the Chief Middle East Economist at Bloomberg, head of Economics at QNB Group, and economist at Fulcrum Asset Management. Ziad holds a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics and a BSC in Economics and Statistics from University College London.
Next, we have Diana Duran Nunez, who is a Bogota-based journalist. She most recently was a reporter for the TV news magazine Los Informantes, forgive my pronunciation, on Caracol Television in Colombia. For over 15 years, she's focused on human rights abuses, drug trafficking, corruption, and Colombia's internal conflict. She is a well-decorated reporter. She's received two Simon Bolivar National Journalism Awards, which is Colombia's highest honor in journalism. She's also won the Inter-American Press Association's Excellence in Journalism Award, and has taught journalism as a university professor in Bogota.
Third, we have my colleague in the government department, Professor Timothy Colton, who is the Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies and the chair of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His main interest is Russian and post-Soviet government and politics. He's the author of The Dilemma of Reform in The Soviet Union, Moscow, Governing The Socialist Metropolis, which was named the best scholarly book in government and political science by the Association of American Publishers, Transitional Citizens, Voters and What Influences Them in The New Russia, and multiple other books, so a much published expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union.
And last but not least, we have Rana Mitter, who is the ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, and is the author also of multiple books that include Forgotten Ally, China's World War II, which won the 2014 Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature and was named a book of the year in The Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China's Good War, How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism. And his writing on contemporary China has appeared recently in Foreign Affairs, The Harvard Business Review, The Spectator, The Critic, and The Guardian. And he won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, which is awarded by the UK Historical Association.
So we have a group of very distinguished and qualified speakers with us here today, and I'm very much looking forward to their remarks. So I will now turn it over to Ziad, who will kick us off. Thank you.
ZIAD DAOUD: Thank you very much, Melani, for the introduction. And thank you for having me. Good afternoon, everyone.
So what I want to talk about is I want to talk about the US elections and the Middle East, and I'm going to talk about it in three moments. I want to talk about the pre-election moment and how the Biden administration and the relationship with the Middle East over the last four years. I want to talk about the election moment. And I also want to talk about the Middle East in the next four years and what kind of Middle East the new administration is likely to face.
So if I start with the summary of the last four or five years, I think if you look at what analysts think of the Middle East, they often say that the US interests in the Middle East are basically two things. It's the security of oil and energy supplies, and it's the security of US allies in the region, especially Israel. And if we're going to summarize the last four or five years of the Biden administration relationship with the Middle East, these two issues loom very large.
And you can see them by looking basically four scenes from the last four or five years. The first scene is during the election campaign when President Biden vowed to turn Saudi Arabia into a pariah state. That is just during the election campaign. That is Scene 1.
Did he succeed in doing this? Probably not, because in Scene 2, which is in July 2022, President Biden makes a trip to Saudi Arabia, to Riyadh, in the heat of the summer, trying to convince Saudi Arabia to increase oil output. At that time, oil prices were very high following the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, and President Biden went to Saudi Arabia, tried to convince the OPEC+ group of countries to increase oil output and reduce pressure on oil prices.
So that's Scene 2. That actually didn't work out because almost two or three months later, OPEC+, led by Saudi Arabia, reduced oil output instead of increasing it, as the White House was demanding back then. And then that takes us to Scene number 3, which is almost a year later, late September 2023.
National security advisor in the US, Jake Sullivan, says the Middle East has never been quieter today compared with the last two decades. And sure enough, almost a week later, the Middle East erupted in fire. There were the October 7 attack, and then there was a war that started and is still raging today. It has widened, has continued, and it has intensified to this very day and this very moment.
And that takes us to the fourth scene from the relationship with the Biden administration and the Middle East, which was basically last week, President Biden himself coming out saying no other administration has helped Israel more than me. And I hope that Netanyahu should remember that.
So these are the five scenes that summarize the Biden administration's relationship with the Middle East over the last few years. And they're summarized around the two topics, which is basically oil and the security of allies, particularly Israel.
What does the election mean for the Middle East? I think there are two key questions. And the key issue in the Middle East and one of the key issues in the world is obviously the raging war that's currently taking place in the region. And there are two questions surrounding the war and how the different candidates are likely to handle these two questions. The first question is, who is more likely to basically reach a ceasefire in the region of form, hopefully initially, temporarily, and eventually a permanent ceasefire in the war in the region. And the second question is, what conditions.
National Security Council member Brett McGurk outlined the conditions that the US would not accept in the region. And at the Manama dialogue last November, he said there are five nodes for the US as far as the conflict is in the region is concerned. There will be no displacement of Palestinians, there will be no loss of territory from Gaza, there'll be no besiegement of Gaza, no reoccupation, but also no attacks on Israel and no threats to Israel.
So I think there's a question mark of which of these two candidates is likely A, to reach a ceasefire in the region, and B, whether these five conditions that the US administration outlined last year will be met. And I've heard and read different hypotheses about how different candidates are likely to achieve one, but not the other.
To be honest, I don't like to sit on the fence, but on this one, I'm 50-50 on these. There are people who say that President Trump is averse to war and therefore he's more likely to end the war. But there are also others that say that President Trump may not be as committed to the 5 nodes outlined by the US administration last year, and yes, a ceasefire might be reached, but the conditions may not be great and that might lead to further disruption further down the road.
On this issue, I don't have a strong conviction. What I have strong conviction is the shape of the Middle East in the coming years. Because what this war and the ongoing war and the events of the past year, what are they going to lead to? And what history tells us they're going to lead to, they're going to lead to some predictable consequences, but also unintended consequences. And the Middle East is going to be less predictable and probably less stable in the coming years.
Why do I say this? Well, three reasons, the first one, the seeds of instability and dissatisfaction were already in place in the Middle East before the start of the war a year ago. People often talk about the Arab Spring in 2011, but there's also a second wave of protests in the Arab world in 2019. And if you add up what happened in 2011 with what happened in 2019, and take stock of that, basically every single Arab Republic and some monarchies have faced popular protests and that happened in two waves. And in some cases, it led to the toppling of governments in the region, whether we're talking about Egypt, whether we're talking about Tunisia, Libya, but also Iraq and Sudan and Lebanon.
So there's already seeds of dissatisfaction in the region. The protests, in many countries, it didn't lead to more political openness. Look at Tunisia's recent elections. It didn't lead, in many countries, to better economic conditions.
So the seeds of dissatisfaction are already there. So that's element number 1. Element number 2 is the war. Anyone who has visited the Middle East over the past year will notice there's a lot of fury, there's a lot of rage, and there's a lot of anger on the street that expresses itself in some countries in protests. Other countries don't allow protests.
That expresses itself in some countries in large parts of the Middle East through the boycott of certain brands. And if you listen to investor calls from some companies, they will tell you that our sales are affected because of the events in the Middle East. That expresses itself in social media. And that expresses itself, if you talk to ordinary people on the street in the Arab world, you will hear a lot of anger and dissatisfaction.
And dissatisfaction could multiply if we get a resolution or a condition in which you have loss of territory in Gaza or in the West Bank or in Lebanon, or you have displacement of people from Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon into other countries or into different parts of the same country. So already you have the roots of dissatisfaction. You have a lot of fury and anger right now.
And I think the last thing that I'd like to mention is basically this is a big moment in the history of the Middle East. And each of the big historical moments in the Middle East, whether you think about the Iraq war in 2003 or the Arab Spring in 2011 and '19, what we've had is not just more support for more radical groups, not just more fertile ground for radicalization, but also the emergence of new players that are, well, that weren't as known as before, or even completely new.
And I think this moment is probably bigger in the history of the Middle East, and the Iraq war is probably bigger than the Arab Spring. So you'd expect not only that some actors will gain popularity as a result of this, but also new actors to emerge. And what does that mean for the new US administration?
Whichever one is going to come up in the next few years is probably going to have to spend time on the Middle East. A, because of potential instability, B, because of the ongoing war, which hasn't finished and is still ongoing and is still intensifying. And C, because the region is still very important to the global economy and to energy supplies.
Let's remember that the Middle East produces about one third of global oil supply, and the war is getting closer to these fields. The Middle East produces about one fifth of global gas supply, and the war is getting closer to these fields. And that 6 of the top 10 oil-exporting countries are from the Middle East. And, again, the war is getting closer to them there.
So, yes, multiple US administrations have tried to pivot away from the Middle East to focus on the competition with China. But given these three conditions, probably the next administration will spend more time on the Middle East than it would like to. And let me stop here. Thank you.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Thank you so much, Ziad. Lots to think about there. And I'm going to turn now to Diana.
DIANA DURAN NUNEZ: OK. Thank you, Melani. I'm going to show you a very humble presentation that I've prepared for today. So it's on the screen, right? We're all looking at it?
MELANI CAMMETT: Yes, but it's in present-- you need to put. There you go.
DIANA DURAN NUNEZ: Yeah. OK. So as you were told just before, I am a Colombian journalist. And I have covered Colombia and Latin America for a while now.
So for this webinar, the question try to work around was what's at stake for Latin America with the presidential election in the US. And I'd like to talk to you about three main issues. They are not the only issues that are important to Latin America or the US, but I think because of the context that the US is going through, these are main issues to approach today.
So the first one would be the immigration as the boogeyman. So I'm sure you are very aware of how this has become like a huge, huge concern for the US electorate. I think the media is playing a role in there, too. And it is expected that this will be a determinant issue for the whole campaign, for the whole bit.
The thing is that there are two candidates, two main candidates. So you have Kamala Harris on one side and Trump on the other. And because it is reasonably expectable that Kamala Harris will go on with Biden's main policies regarding immigration, there is no surprise expected there.
But with Trump, things might change quite a bit. And the thing is from his 2016 period to today, his language has only hardened. It has become much more stronger against immigrants in the country.
I would like to remember some phrases that have come out of Trump's mouth to understand completely this context that we are going through. So it's, like, "They are rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums, you know, insane asylums. That's Silence of the Lambs stuff."
That's something he said on March 4th this year in an interview with Right Side Broadcasting Network. And I have other examples. But I think this illustrates quite well my point.
His speech is, of course, problematic. And it makes especially the immigrant population in the US more vulnerable to violence. As we have already seen, there are plenty of examples about that.
And what we see also is how Trump is using a certain context to work the numbers in his favor. So it is a fact that immigration has raised, skyrocketed in the past years during Biden's administration. I've organized some numbers here that you are looking at right now.
And as you can see, the number of people who were detained in Mexico trying to cross the border is over 800,000 last year. So that is so much more than in any other year. This is another way to look at the same numbers that give us the proportion of what is going on with regards to migrants who have been detained in Mexico and who are in an irregular situation.
So the thing about this topic in particular is that most likely Trump's aggressive style, this hands-off style, won't influence the US foreign policy over Latin America. There might be some tiny decisions, like the ones they have been making, like Biden and Trump when they have been in charge. But we do not expect a huge change.
And I think what's most important here is that for Latin American countries, migration is not as important as it is for the US. And I think there is a huge challenge that the next US President, whoever that is, either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, they need to understand that in order to design policies that might be more successful for the US interests. In the Latin American countries that are involved with the migration matter are being made, yes, but not big policy decisions. They are just temporary measures, like Band-Aid. So if the US really wants to see a different outcome in this sense, they do need to raise concern and interest among their partners in Latin America in order to do that.
So thinking about what Latin America expect out of this election, I think one of the points, and it's also related to what I was just saying about immigration is the respect for sovereignty. And I'm saying this using Mexico as an example. Basically because Mexico shares a huge portion of their borderline with the US.
So not many countries in Latin America have to deal as directly as Mexico with the US. And so I'll use Mexico as an example. And when Trump was a candidate, and then he became president in January 2016, he claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall. And he actually told people that Mexico was paying for the wall.
But the truth is the money came from the US budget. Mexico didn't pay for that. And what happened was that Trump and Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, who just recently stepped down from power, they actually managed to build a really good relationship for both sides.
So what analysts say about the relationship is that Trump went on with his discourse about you're going to pay for the wall and we're going to charge, he wanted to apply new taxes on basically merchandise that was coming from China through Mexico and then the US, none of that happened. Trump claimed it a lot, but it never happened.
And what happened was that Trump actually started building the wall, that it was not as much as he said he would, but there was a start on that. And Lopez Obrador managed to do things his own way in Mexico. They built a relationship of respect so Trump wouldn't actually meddle in Mexico's business, nor Mexico in Trump's business. And it worked pretty well for both of them.
So that's the first point, that it's the autonomy for the Latin American countries. That's something that all Latin American countries expect from the US. And I think that even though it seems obvious, I'm saying that idea also within a context, which is how the US for decades has heavily influenced over Latin American policies.
My second point here is the assistance on the drug wars. So that is something absolutely relevant for Latin American countries who deal with the narco trafficking issue. And the problem is that right now I think most, if not all the countries in Latin America, have to deal with the drug trafficking issue one way or the other. Central America countries have become corridors. They are not producers, but they are very important in the chain to get to the US, for the drugs to get to the US.
So they are part of the problem, too. The problem was brought to them, basically. In South America, there are the two main producers of cocaine, which is Colombia and Peru. The problem of drug trafficking has become a huge deal in Ecuador, which is right between Colombia and Peru.
Brazil has a problem. Argentina has a problem because they have also become corridors to take the drugs out to either Australia, Europe, Africa. So that's what I mean when I say that most, if not all the countries in Latin America, have to deal with the drug problem.
And that leads me to another issue. Before going to the corridors, there's also one thing about this drug wars. And it's that for the past decade, kind of new voices have raised concern on the fact that the drug war has failed. But no significant changes have been taken even though there is a huge controversy on how effective the drug wars is.
And the problem for the producer countries like Colombia is that the drug wars has implied a lot of human rights abuses. And it hasn't been successful at all when approaching the problem and when dealing with the problem. So what we see in countries like Colombia is that a vulnerable population like peasants, so people who have no education, who have no resources, and live in these very isolated regions where armed groups are the law and order institutions, basically. So they harvest coca crops and they are prosecuted for it.
So Colombia's current government, which is the first left wing Colombian government in history ever, they are trying to promote the change, like a swift in the drug policy around the world. But they have not been successful in finding partners to actually make their proposal serious enough to be taken into account for other players of this topic in the world. So they have actually talked about it twice in the Vienna Convention, which is the annual convention to talk about drugs.
But nothing's happened. And not even Peru, which would be the obvious partner, the obvious ally, has actually become engaged with this idea. So there is a huge challenge there to take into account for the next administrations in the US and Latin American countries.
There is also one problem that stems from the migration issue and the narco trafficking problem and is the opening of corridors. So the corridors are the routes that illegal groups set in different places, different countries in order to move stuff around. So by stuff, I mean, drugs. But I also mean smuggling, merchandise that they smuggle, and I also mean people.
And the problem about this is that because of the migration, because of these large numbers of people who are trying to make it to the United States through land, the migration has become a business opportunity for illegal organizations. That is going on right now. So what's happening is that new corridors are being set, new territories are in dispute, human trafficking is increasing, and there are no steps, there are no measures that are being taken to approach this huge problem that is just growing.
So last but not least, with the US election, there is something else to take into account with regards to Latin America, and that is the influence that China has harvested for the past decade. So up until 10 years ago, Latin America was considered an irrefutable partner of the US interests. But that has changed. And it has changed basically because China decided to have a huge expansion around the globe, and Latin America is part of that expansion.
So now countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, they have all developed really strong commercial relations with China. In countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, it's also about how they have found a partner, an ally in China after being sanctioned by the US.
So I don't mean to say this in a light way. But one of the outcomes of the economic sanctions of the US to these countries is that they have turned to Venezuela to find the money that they were finding in the US. So Hugo Chavez built a very strong relationship with China that is still alive, that it is still very important for Venezuela. It couldn't stop the economic crisis that has also led to this big influx of migrants to the US from Venezuela. But it has given resources to the government, which is one of the reasons why they are still where they are.
For instance, in Ecuador in 2018, China welcomed that country in what they call the New Silk Road, which meant coordination of public policies, participation of Chinese companies in Ecuador and infrastructure projects, commercial, and financial connectivity. China has conducted businesses directly in yuans with countries like Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.
The latter is the biggest country in Latin America. They have a population that goes roughly to up to 200 million people. And it's China's largest commercial partner in the region. Javier Milei, who's Argentina's new president, he's also reminded us of something that it's key when thinking of the US elections. And that is that politics are always politics.
So because he despises anything that is considerably related to a left wing ideology, he decided he doesn't want to work with China anymore. So, for instance, he wants to build an a navy base in Tierra Del Fuego, which is like the entrance to the Antarctic. And he wants to do it with the United States.
And China was supposed to be the ally for that project. And there had already been conversations. And it was quite advanced.
And Milei stopped it. And he invited the commander of the Southern Command. It's called General Laura Richardson. He invited her to Tierra Del Fuego. And she was there in April this year. And he announced with her there that they were going to do the project with the United States aboard.
So the thing about this is that Latin America is a complex compound of left wing, right wing, and authoritarian governments. Some shared interests with the US remain intact. Some have shifted as new political actors pop in.
And I think that's something that definitely either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump must bear in mind when they try to figure out how to connect with Latin America for their four year period. Thank you.
MELANI CAMMETT: Thank you so much, Diana. A lot to chew on there that we'll come back to. And I hear some common themes across the different presentations so far as well. So let me turn next to Tim Colton.
TIMOTHY COLTON: OK. Melani, am I audible?
MELANI CAMMETT: You are audible, but not visible.
TIMOTHY COLTON: Yeah. I don't seem to be able to make myself visible. It's no great loss, probably, but here you go. Host has asked me to start my video.
Sorry about that. There we go. OK, good.
All right. So my assignment is to talk about Russia. And to some extent, the countries in the region surrounding it, which is what I mostly study, what I do for a living.
And in terms of US foreign policy, which is our focus here today, I mean, in so many ways, this is the country, I think, that the US foreign policy establishment would like to forget. Russia, formerly the Soviet Union, the new Russian state, has sorely disappointed the hopes that were placed around it 30 or 35 years ago when the great transition away from European communism occurred. And so in a sense, in disappointing us and letting down our own hopes, we helped create a little bit of a monster in that we use a yardstick that is, in some regards, probably not really applicable to this particular country or to countries like it.
So it was widely hoped and believed, for that matter, that the new Russia would be a democracy, a political democracy, a liberal democracy, which it is not. It was widely believed and hoped that its economic arrangements would mimic our own. And they have not.
It was widely believed, until quite late in the day, in fact, that Russia would have a largely peaceful relationship with its immediate neighbors, and that has not worked out so well, either. And it was believed that Russia would, on the whole, be a cooperative player when it came to security questions, that it would acquiesce in some American unilateralism in Europe, and that it would, oh the whole, be a constructive partner to some extent, at least, on our terms. And that also has not worked out so well.
At various points since the Great Transition occurred in the early 1990s, at various points, it seemed that Russia was kind of in the process of writing itself out of the great power game. So first of all, the Soviet Union broke up, to some extent because the Russian majority within the Soviet population and the Russian unit of the Soviet Federation helped break it up. And so a considerably lesser state emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union and to some great extent, the Russians' own doing.
In the 1990s, the Russians embarked on extremely ambitious but poorly managed reforms, social, economic, and political arrangements which produced chaos as much as a new order, at least for the first 10 or 15 years. When Putin came to power in the early 2000s, Russia began to turn away from some of the more acquiescent behaviors that characterized its posture in the 1990s. And then eventually, of course, it enters into conflicts with the countries in its immediate environs, but also assumes an increasingly conflictual relationship with the Western countries generally, and in particular with the United States.
So if it were a small country, if it didn't have the world's largest nuclear arsenal, if it didn't have the particular attachment to ideas of greatness that its elite has, then it might perhaps just disappear as a major concern, and we could forget about it. But US administrations have learned the hard way more than once, that it's difficult, and indeed, for the time being, impossible to just forget about Russia. It has a way of coming back as a concern and nowadays, of course, as a very pressing problem.
So what had been a cooperative relationship a generation ago became, I would call it, a kind of hybrid relationship under Putin's watch, where there was conflict, but there was also cooperation. And nowadays, there's just about nothing but conflict. That is, there are mere traces now and residues of an earlier cooperative phase. And we find ourselves at loggerheads with Russia on almost every issue under the sun, starting, of course, with the war with and in Ukraine, which I hardly need to tell you, has been raging for it's going on three years now.
We are adamantly supporting their adversary. The Russians know that. They have turned away from almost every shred of cooperation with the United States of America, the country we're talking about here. And at least verbally and rhetorically are fashioning pretty radically new image of where they belong in the world.
Now I say it's radical because it does marks a major departure. So that you have Russian thinkers, not so much Putin himself, but people of influence in their elite talking about Russia becoming an Asian country, if you can believe it. So I gave a talk not so long ago called "Farewell to Peter the Great," in which the claim was being made by some Russian intellectuals that it was time to turn away from Europe, that Russia was going to have to find a completely different way of relating to its surroundings geopolitically, culturally, economically, socially.
I mention culture because this turns out to be a pretty major part of the discourse. Russia has officially redefined itself as of 2023 as a civilizational state. So this joins a rather limited club of countries around the world, including, of course, China, which think of themselves in those terms.
Now some of this honestly is hot air, perhaps more than reality. But there is an aspiration, at least in certain quarters, to move away from the West kind of once and for all. Which won't mean that we can forget Russia, but that we're going to have to be looking at it no longer really across the Atlantic, but across other bodies of water.
Now, when it comes to the election, the Russians, of course, are paying attention, but I would say not that much attention. It's, I think, of much less concern to them than past elections were over the last 10 or 20 years because they're, at least, at leadership level, by and large, convinced that nothing good is going to come of the election from Russia's point of view, in which case why bother.
Harris the Democratic candidate, is largely unknown to them. I'm not even sure she's been to Moscow. I'm not sure about that. But she's certainly not a known quantity.
And it is generally assumed at high levels in Moscow that she will continue the Biden status quo policy concerning the war, which is their main concern. Now Putin did quip at one point a few weeks ago that he might actually support her candidacy if asked, because so many Americans were seeing the positive side of her. But I'd say no one really took that comment seriously.
As for Trump, well, of course, they're familiar with him. On the whole, he is probably their preference. If you pressed Putin and said, OK, you have to pick one or the other, which would you prefer, I think he would probably say Trump. He is more of a known quantity. They dealt with him for four years.
There seems to be some kind of personal rapport between Trump and Putin. I don't know how far to push this. We have very little hard evidence on this score.
The papers today are reporting Bob Woodward's new book on these matters where he claims that an informant told him that Putin and Trump have had seven personal conversations, remote conversations since Trump left office. So that's kind of intriguing. But it's not clear what it means. And it's not even clear whether these conversations took place. We'll have to see.
The Russians do note that Trump claims that he will broker a settlement to the Ukraine war even before he's sworn in as president for a second time, which would be, of course, unconstitutional behavior. The presumption here being that Trump will pressure the Ukrainians into making large concessions. So we'll have to see. I don't see any evidence that Trump has thought this through or how he's going to impose these conditions on the Ukrainians or on the rest of the American political establishment, or whether he has even thought what these concessions would mean in other terms.
And the Russians, when you have a chance to converse with them about this, will point out that however much of a change in tone there was in the relationship the last time, that Trump, in the end, did Russia no favors in his first term. And moreover, and this is a word that Putin himself has used vis-a-vis Trump more than once, Trump is an extremely unpredictable and unreliable character. So they have, I would say, no illusions about Trump, but if pressed to choose, they would probably prefer Trump.
A couple of other comments on the election. One of them is that they do follow the Congressional elections. And experts, and they have a lot of people who know quite a bit about American politics, pay a lot of attention to what's going on in the Senate and House races. Because they're very well aware how our system works. And the fact that any future lumps of aid for Ukraine are going to have to be approved by both houses of Congress, whoever is sitting in the White House. So the election for them means not just the presidential election.
And as a side note here, I think at this moment, at least, the Russian government probably sees more opportunities for undermining Western support for Ukraine in Europe than it sees in the United States. And I'm thinking especially of transient countries like Germany, Italy, to some extent, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and so forth.
I'm not going to say much about Russian manipulation and intervention in the election campaign this year. It is occurring to a very limited extent, as best I can make out. It's certainly a minor theme in talking about this event than was the case four years ago, and especially in 2016 when, as we all know, some units of the Russian system did devote a good deal of attention and resources to trying to affect the presidential election of that year in Trump's favor.
The individual, a man named Prigozhin, who supervised this effort, eventually became a warlord and was an active leader in the war with Ukraine, mounted a mutiny against Putin in 2023, and several months later was assassinated. So he did not meet a good end.
The current curator, as the Russians would say, the curator in charge of defining Russia's posture vis-a-vis a US election, as well as the most significant Kremlin coordinator of programs vis-a-vis internal affairs, is a very different individual named Sergei Kiriyenko, who, believe it or not, was one of Yeltsin's prime ministers in an earlier historical epoch. He was a young reformer who is now today a mainstay of late Putinism. And I can say more about him, if you like.
As for consequences, I realize I have just another minute or two. So it is reasonable to expect that the war, if we focus on that, will most likely come to an end or at least to a point of suspension in the next US presidential term. And so whoever wins and however that war ends, these things are likely to be interconnected in a rather powerful way.
But having said that, my own sense is that the geopolitical outcome here will depend more on what happens in the battlefield than on anything that happens in Washington now. Of course, Washington does control the arms spigot to a considerable extent, but I think we know from the past year that that's not going to be enough to decide the outcome in this struggle.
Is the war going to end in Russian victory, Ukrainian victory? It depends to some extent, on what you mean by victory. And an outright victory by one side or the other could have very radical consequences for internal domestic affairs in both these countries, for politics in the region, but also for world politics. And I can speculate on that in the Q&A, if you like.
What seems more likely is that this war of attrition, which is currently being fought in such bloody fashion, will grind to a halt in a stalemate or conceivably a formal negotiated armistice, like was achieved in Korea in 1953. There's a lot of speculation about this. Could there possibly be a negotiated settlement? There are signs that the central domain combatants are starting to take this seriously for the first time since 2022.
I say since 2022, because in the early weeks of the war, there was, in fact, direct negotiation between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Turkey, which arrived at a tentative agreement to settle the conflict. But that agreement was not implemented for a variety of reasons. You can now actually see a draft of the agreement in English if you're interested. So there's been some good investigative journalism and reporting on it.
And so I can speculate on these various outcomes. I think, again, that events on the battlefield are likely to matter quite a bit more than what happens in Washington. But I think we should be open-minded and watch very carefully as these events unfold. So I'm going to stop at that because I don't want to over overstay my 10 minutes.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Thank you so much, Tim. I'm going to turn now to Rana.
RANA MITTER: Right. OK. Thanks very much. Can I just check I'm being heard properly? Yep, good. Thumbs up from Melani there.
OK. Hello, everyone. Great to be on with this large and interesting group and such wonderful colleagues with such interesting things to say.
I will take a few minutes out of 10 minutes to talk a little bit about the way in which the outcome of the US election, I think, may be received in China, at least in foreign policy circles. I will add that, since this is a topic that clearly could fill many, many hours, I'm going to select really three topics and speak about each of them pretty briefly as a means of throwing some points of potential interest into the discussion.
I'm very aware that I cannot and will not do a comprehensive survey of this particular subject, I have to say. Although if you're interested in that, actually, I would look at a publication that just come out in which I do have an essay edited by Jude Blanchette and Lily McElwee at CSIS. It's on the CSIS website, and it's a new, comprehensive look by about 20 scholars at US-China relations as they are now. So that will be a good deep dive if you want more.
OK. A few words about what might happen in the aftermath of November 5. And I will say, first of all, that if you think that there is feverish speculation about the outcome of the US election on TV, then I have to say that the only place that in recent months and years that I've seen as much interest as there is, say, on CNN is in some of the think tanks of Beijing, where I was lucky enough to be able to visit a few months ago, just back in June over the summer, and found that indeed many people very, very well-informed about US politics, very much wanted to talk about this subject and gave me an often highly granular account of the voting patterns in various Pennsylvania and Wisconsin counties. So you need have no doubt that there's very careful and detailed attention to the outcome of the result.
What I would do is to take three issues. The first is trade, second is Taiwan, the third is what you might call energy and security and the link between them, and just say a few words in each case about where there might either be differences or, and it's worth noting, similarities in terms of how the outcome might affect US dealings with China.
I would say, first of all, in talking to a fair number of Chinese thinkers, and I use that phrase because these are people who are either academics working in think tanks, some of the business media involved, but people who have a pretty sophisticated view of the world, that in general, their views about the outcome of the US presidential election were actually not categorizable in one direction or another simply. There were some people who wanted to see a victory for President Trump on the grounds that this would be a reset of the global order in unpredictable, potentially productive ways for China. There were others, perhaps more establishment-oriented, who said that a continued Biden administration, as it then was, or now, I guess a Harris administration, would at least provide some stability and continuity with moves that have been made in the last few months.
And probably the overall majority view, just about majority anyway, was that actually it might not make that much difference on the grounds that relations between the US and China will be bumpy and probably more than that, turbulent, maybe, for quite some time to come. Although most seemed at least hopeful that a confrontation would be more in the realms of rhetoric and economics rather than military. And I'm sure we would all hope that that's very much the case.
So that all said, give you a little bit of the view that I gathered from talking to folks in Beijing, let me give a quick take on where some of the points of difference might come in the aftermath of the election. The first one is on trade. Now, I think it's fair to say that what would unite or at least be similar in either a Harris administration or a Trump II administration would be a fairly robust attitude towards tariffs and trade in general.
The Biden administration has not been a free trade administration in the full sense that many of its Democrat and Republican predecessors were in the 1990s. It's just gone in a very different direction, as we know. But that said, there's still an interest there in maintaining the structures broadly of the global trading order.
And if that were the case, then I think China would continue to essentially try and navigate its way around the difficulties, particularly in terms of areas such as increasing restrictions on tech investment and intellectual property transfer into China, which likely would be pursued probably more robustly and firmly even by a Harris administration than the current Biden administration, although that direction of travel is very clear. Many of you will have seen the restrictions, for instance, on EV driving software that were put in place just a couple of weeks back.
But that lies in contrast, I think, with what at least we are promised by people involved with a Trump II administration potentially on the trade side, which is the idea of tariffs. And a widely defined tariff policy, with both 10% to 20% tariffs on Allied nations of the United States looking to import into the US, along with a 60% tariff on Chinese imports, would clearly be a very different form of international trade. Now we don't yet know, of course, whether this would in fact be implemented literally as put forward, but certainly these phrases have been used by senior people associated with the Republican campaign.
And so at least in terms of prediction, we have to take it seriously. And in that context, clearly, there would be a great deal of damage to China in terms of being able to export the many goods that it has to send into the US as part of its global trade surplus. At the same time, the almost inevitable result of that would be global pushback on the United States with probably other states, including Allied states and entities, such as the European Union, looking to impose tariffs of their own.
And we simply don't know whether in that scenario, whether China might find an opportunity to essentially go to the EU, go to other actors, with which it doesn't always have that good a relationship, and say in this matter, in terms of access to the US market, in terms of WTO standards, it may be that the EU and China have more to say to each other. Not saying that that would happen, just saying that it's a theoretical possibility is a second order outcome of a much more tariff-oriented Trump. administration, if that is in fact what comes to pass. But China is certainly thinking hard in terms of its own trade about what happens if that does go forward.
Let's take the second point now, Taiwan. And, again, I think there's no secret, none at all, that US administrations, certainly of both political parties in the last 10, 20 years, have become increasingly concerned to make sure that the current autonomous status of Taiwan remains. And it's a very tricky tightrope for the United States because no US administration supports formal independence for Taiwan. And it's extremely unlikely to impossible, frankly, I think, that they would make that an official policy.
At the same time, the continued ability of Taiwan to maintain its own governance, its own trade routes, and its own capacity to make decisions in the security area continue to be very important for the US and its allies in the region, including, of course, Japan and South Korea.
So the question comes again as to whether or not we'd see the same policy or something different, depending who gets elected. I think both Harris and the Trump II administration, as far as we can tell, would both be in a position of wanting to maintain the continued support for Taiwan's status as it is at the moment. The reason I say that is because that's what the Biden administration has done, and I suspect that a Harris administration would do something very different.
On the Trump II side, the situation, again, is not as clear. But we know that significant voices who've been associated with previous Trump administrations have spoken up in favor of a strong defense of Taiwan. And, again, the co-written article by former Trump Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger in Foreign Affairs recently is a good example of that kind of thinking. That doesn't guarantee that that's the outcome, but it suggests that, at least that direction of travel, is not outside the realm of possibilities, particularly since a second Trump administration will be likely to want to show strength in the region.
My own additional thought is that, in the current situation where China's economy, as we're all aware, is in a difficult situation. We saw just a week or two ago the reversing of many of the previous Chinese economic policies, including on fiscal stimulus, to try and get the economy going again. And I suspect that there's a widespread realization that, while nobody knows the magic button to press to get the Chinese economy going again, the one thing that would guarantee an economic disaster would be getting into a military conflict with the United States or any other actor.
And therefore, at least in economic terms, the direction of travel does not logically point towards that kind of confrontation. But it doesn't, of course, guarantee that it would not happen. And US-China relations under any administration will continue to have Taiwan at the center as a highly sensitive topic. I would say, trying to assess it at its most basic. But the likelihood of all out conflict over Taiwan is still relatively low, but the effects of such a conflict could be anything from highly damaging to catastrophic for all parties, certainly including China, but also the wider region and, economically speaking, of course, the United States as well.
The final point I'll make is one that I think is going to be of more visible importance during the course of the next administration. That could be, of course, potentially eight years if we get a President Harris, who could run for re-election, or the next four years if it's the second term for President Trump, and then possibly the attempt to have a successor who comes after that. But in either case, the 2030s are likely to see much more need for the US and China to concentrate on creating allies, or partners, or at least economically dependent actors in the economically important areas of the world.
And I'll just mention one, Southeast Asia, where it's becoming increasingly clear that the need to move towards cheap, abundant energy in a post-fossil fuel environment, at least at this stage, gives China one particular advantage, which is its strong control over solar panels and other post-fossil fuel green energy technologies. This is an area that will be an immense challenge for the United States and its allies in the next period to come.
It's not yet clear quite what the answer from the liberal world is towards something where China genuinely at the moment, largely because of industrial investment and scale of production, has a real advantage. But if the United States and allies are choosing to essentially make partners of newly emerging powers in South East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, which Diana mentioned, amongst others, having an answer to the question of energy hunger is going to be absolutely essential.
And I think it's fair to say that the Harris campaign and the Trump campaign have taken quite different views about where energy futures lie. The Harris administration putting much more on the shoulders of transition to green energy, the Trump campaign talking much more about traditional fossil fuel-based energy solutions. Mostly in a domestic context, but that domestic context inevitably will gravitate over into international relations.
So three areas there, trade, Taiwan, and energy security, which are three amongst 12, 15, or 20 different issues that one could talk about in terms of the US-China relationship. All that I will finish by saying, Melani, is that the US election will be consequential for the US-China relationship, although some aspects will be the same regardless of who's in power, on these important issues. The Chinese themselves are certainly spending a great deal of time thinking through what the possibilities are. And of course, in just a few weeks' time, I guess the rest of us will also have the opportunity to work that out as well when we know what the result is.
So I'll hand back to you. Thank you.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Thank you so much. And I think it's appropriate that we ended up with our discussion of China and the implications for the US-Chinese relationship. Because I think China has woven its way in one way or another to all of these regions with implications for all of these regions and the US relationship with all of these regions.
So I'm mindful of the time. We actually only have about 10 to 15 minutes. So I'm going to just pose a couple of questions to the panel, if you could quickly respond. One of which I'll pull from the chat.
The first question that I'd like to pose has to do with us leverage in these different regions and to what degree has US leverage to pursue these diverse interests in these diverse regions evolved over time? And that's in part a product of the evolving role of China on the global stage and, to some degree, the relationship with Russia. So we have in some ways interconnections here across all of our presentations. So what about leverage?
And then the second question coming from the chat has to do with the differential implications of the election for geopolitics and for the United States itself. So one common theme I heard in all these presentations, and our attendee seems to have picked up on this as well, is that there aren't necessarily clear cut high stakes in this election for foreign policy vis-a-vis the different regions we've explored. Now there's some variation across regions for sure, and some variation across issue areas within regions.
But by and large, I wasn't hearing from anyone a sort of radical break on most issues. Some, to be sure, but we do hear a lot about the stakes for American domestic politics. So what about the possible boomerang effect there? What are the implications of the stakes for American politics and the American political system for geopolitics, if any? And why don't we go in the order-- and I know this is a lot, so feel free to ignore whatever you want to ignore-- but we'll go in the order of the presenter, starting with Ziad.
ZIAD DAOUD: Thank you, Melani. So the question of leverage, I think. Is key for the Middle East. Because I think one of the, I don't know, surprises one of the questions that I keep getting asked in the Middle East over the past year is basically has the US been unwilling or incapable of using its leverage to force a ceasefire and prevent the escalation of the war over the past year. And I don't know. I mean, people are writing about this now. People are speculating.
People tell you that it wasn't in the US national interest for the Middle East war to expand and potentially end up in a confrontation that involves the US on one side and Iran on the other side, especially one month before, less than a month before the US elections. And the key thing is what has happened here. Does the US have leverage, especially over Israel?
And it decided not to use that leverage or whether it didn't have the leverage anyway to begin with. And I think we're going to see a test of that in the coming days, even before the elections. I think the whole world expects some form of Israeli attack on Iran. The US has explicitly said don't attack oil facilities. We don't want higher oil prices right before the elections.
So we're going to see if there is leverage there and whether the Israelis are going to attack Iranian oil facilities and whether they are going to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, which probably the US may or may not have discouraged.
MELANI CAMMETT: Sorry, Diana.
DIANA DURAN NUNEZ: OK. Thank you, Melani. Well, with regards to Latin America, I think that the US may find leverage in two things.
So one of them is that in many Latin American countries, [? firms ?] rely on the US resources for them to carry on. So that is always an advantage on the US. And it is a fact that once the US cut off resources for any of those programs, the Latin American countries struggled very much to find new sources of funding for those programs.
So that is a huge, huge deal for Latin American countries. And the other thing is the relations with the military. So the US, in many countries, has supported basically the professionalization, if that makes sense in English, which is making the armies more professional.
So they've given not only resources as in money, but also a lot of important technical, technological, and human resources that have been a key player for the armed forces in Latin America to evolve into these more professional and well-respected forces, with a lot of controversy around what I just said. But, like in Colombia's case, without the Plan Colombia, it would have been impossible for the army to be where it is right now. So I think those two key points are leverage for the US.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great, Tim.
TIMOTHY COLTON: Yes, as far as leverage is concerned, so Russia is engaged in this struggle with its neighbor, which has been a distraction. It has eaten up resources. It competes with everything else for bandwidth at the leadership level.
And so I think the trend since the war began, and one could even say going back to 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, is of ebbing Russian influence in its former imperial zone. But it's not quite as simple as that. I mean, in certain parts of this space, I think Russian influence has crept forward if one is to speak, for example, about Georgia and the South Caucasus or Belarus, which is more and more tightly in Russia's grip, or some parts of Central Asia.
The winners, though, it doesn't have too much to do with the United States, I think, in many cases. So who's gaining? Well, some of the local players themselves have more autonomy.
One of these players, Azerbaijan, has taken advantage of the opportunity to attack its neighbor, Armenia, and put an end to a three decade long military confrontation. Azerbaijan's main confederate in doing this was Turkey, in fact, not the United States. And so you're seeing regional players who are just a little bit beyond the former imperium now playing considerably more of a role. I would put Turkey pretty high on that list.
Russia is regrouping and it will lick its wounds and attempt to rebuild its influence once the war is over or has been fought to a standstill. In the meantime, it's doing maneuvers, using mercenary forces and other small investments in sub-Saharan Africa. It's looking to groups like BRICS, which was written off as almost a publicity stunt, I think, until fairly recently, but now seems to be getting semireal. And in general, courting what they now call, like the rest of us do, the Global South, which is a phrase that I think Putin wouldn't have even recognized five or six years ago. But he talks about it all the time.
So Russia is not passive in dealing with this. But just to answer your question, I don't think most of this has a lot to do directly with US leverage. As far as consequences go, well, I would focus just on one, I guess. The consequence or consequences of our forthcoming election for the war between Russia and Ukraine.
So if what results from this is a Democratic administration with a majority in both houses of Congress that can push through more aid bills, that's one thing. If Trump comes to power, comes into office, he can use presidential veto power to probably thwart bills of this kind. And there's always the possibility in Washington, of course, of gridlock, of not being able to do anything about the problem. After all, we have trouble deciding whether to fund our government departments on a regular basis.
So I think the consequences could be very, very large indeed. The Ukrainians cannot possibly survive in this conflict indefinitely without a lot of continuing assistance. And if we deny it to them, then they may not lose everything, but they're certainly going to be at an even greater disadvantage than they are today.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. And last, Rana?
RANA MITTER: Yeah. Well, conscious that time is marching on, I'll just make one comment about leverage, really, I think. Right now I think that the United States and China are both facing what you might call a leverage dilemma in their own area of interest, which is the Asia-Pacific more broadly. Which is that-- put far too simplistically because we've only got about two minutes, so I'll do it that way-- the US has a plausible and well-respected security offer in terms of military power for most, if not all, the countries in the region.
Some of them are explicitly partners of the US, Philippines, South Korea, and so forth. Others are implicitly in that position, Vietnam. And a small number bandwagon with China, but that is a relatively small number overall. And others which ostensibly are neutral, Indonesia, are actually still, I think in practice, quite happy that the US are there.
But that is no longer, as it was in the Cold War, accompanied by an integrated story on trade, in large part because the era of global free trade, as we all know is looking a bit in the rearview mirror. And instead, there's a question at least of partial protectionism, both in the US and in many other global economies as well.
And China's done the opposite. It has a, in many ways attractive, at least short to medium term economic offer in terms of market access, intellectual property, in terms of Chinese technology fueling say, EV industry in places like Malaysia. But it does not offer, for most countries in the region, any kind of security offer that really has attractive value. And that's of course, tied up with issues such as South China Sea.
So China's dilemma essentially is how to leverage its attractive economic offer into a plausible sounding security offer. And while many efforts have been made, I think it's no insult to anyone in China to say that it hasn't been a very successful effort. At the same time, the US currently needs to think about how or indeed whether it really will be able to provide a geoeconomic offer to the region that makes sense. And that will be a dilemma for any administration, Harris or Trump, that comes in a few months' time.
But I strongly suspect for reasons that everyone on the call, I'm sure, will know that the answer to that question is going to be quite different, depending on what kind of trade and economic policy, more broadly speaking, the incoming administration actually adheres to along with those wider questions of what kind of security picture they want to establish in the Indo-Pacific region, more broadly speaking. But the leverage is there. It's a question of how much either side is willing to actually expend in terms of financial as well as political capital to achieve it.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Well, these are all fantastic insights. Unfortunately, we're not going to have time to get to some of these important issues that have been raised. But I just want to throw them out there by way of conclusion.
We've had a number of questions in the chat from the audience about the role of geopolitics in campaigns. I think I'll leave it to my American politics colleagues to address that. But I think the general consensus is that actually domestic policy is much more important for most voters than international politics, although international politics are really creeping into American public debate more and more as the world seems to be on fire.
Speaking of which, another theme that comes into the chat here is climate change. And there I think we've heard from a couple of our panelists that we do have quite different visions for how to address energy coming out of these two campaigns. And this is a clear point of departure, among others, that has come through in this discussion with the Harris campaign leaning into a vision of driving forward the energy transition while Trump is talking about continued fossil fuels, and reliance on fossil fuels, and so forth.
So we do have quite a different vision there. And we also have a different rhetoric around engagement in international institutions, whether it's NATO or some other body. So a very different vision of at least rhetoric around the rules-based order coming out of these two campaigns.
So I really appreciate all of your excellent insights from these diverse global regions. We've all learned a ton from each of you, and the recording will be up there so that others can benefit from your wisdom. And thank you so much for your time.