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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HPR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Adi Ignatius, editor-in-chief, and today I'm speaking by phone with Richard Haas,

president of the Council on Foreign Relations and former director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department.

He's also the author of the recently published book, Foreign Policy begins at Home,

The Case for Putting America's House in Order.

We want to talk to him today about issues of U.S. competitiveness and

American leadership. So Richard, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

So let's jump right in. The first chapter of your book is called The Return of History.

That obviously resonates with the title of Francis Fukuyama's book, The End of History,

but what exactly are you getting at here?

Well, there was a lot of thinking after the Cold War ended, that somehow we had entered a period of history in which there were going to be two truths.

One was essentially a world no longer defined by great power competition and conflict.

And secondly, with the fall of the Soviet Union, which, if you will, was the poster child for 20th century communism that democracy

and capitalism had essentially won out in the ideological and political and economic struggle with its principal competitor.

And when I write about the return of history it is essentially now, you know, it's a quarter century

since the end of the Cold War since the Berlin Wall came down.

And it's increasingly and painfully obvious that neither of those assumptions holds that

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