 So, good afternoon everybody. You're very welcome to this lunchtime webinar discussion at the IIEA here in Dublin. My name is Michael Collins and I'm the Director General of the Institute of International and European Affairs. We've all been following with great interest over recent months and weeks at the US presidential election. In fact, for many of us, we've done very little else. And indeed, it's aftermath. And to discuss the election's outcome and what an incoming Biden administration may mean for Anglo-American relations and the broader transatlantic relationship, we're absolutely delighted to be joined by Mark Lander, distinguished journalist for nearly three decades with the New York Times. Mark is now the London Bureau Chief of the New York Times and as I said in 28 years at the Times, he's been Bureau Chief in Hong Kong and Frankfurt, White House correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, European economic correspondent and a business reporter in New York City. He's the author of Alter Egos published in 2016, a comparative study of the foreign policy of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And he's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Before I hand over to Mark, I just want to acknowledge the fact that I've known Mark since 2011 when he came to our Ambassador's residence in Washington on the eve of the visit to Ireland by President Obama. And I mentioned that because not only is Mark proud American, but he's also very proud Irish man. His mother was born in Carrick lacrosse, so he had got great familiarity with our border area in County Monon, at least so he knows all about that. So anyway, just to acknowledge that and to say that before I hand over to him to Mark, just a couple of housekeeping issues that I should mention. This full event is on the record, as is usual, both the initial presentation and the Q&A session that will follow. You can join the discussion using Zoom and I think everybody at this stage is familiar with the Q&A function there. And I would encourage you to submit your questions throughout the session as they occur to you and we will come to them as soon as Mark has finished his presentation. Please identify yourself when submitting your question, your name and your affiliation applicable. And lastly, we encourage you to join the conversation on Twitter using the handle at IEA. So with that Mark, very, very glad to see you again. Thank you for joining us today. The floor is all yours. Michael, thank you very much. It's a thrill to be invited to speak at the IIEA and to be back with you. Ambassador Collins was not only a trusted source of mine back in Washington when I covered the White House, he also became a very good friend and we were very sad to see him go. So it's great to be reunited at least for an hour. And also, I just would be remiss if I didn't give my own shout out to anyone who happens to be listening to this from County Monaghan, whereas Michael said my mom was born and grew up and I've been back there many, many times over the years. So it's a lot of fun to do this. I'll just speak for a few minutes about issues that you know a bit about, give you my take on them, and then leave most of the session for Q&A. So I thought I'd start by saying, you know, this was the ultimate good news bad news election for the United States. And, you know, to start with the good news, more than 150 million Americans voted in this election which shattered all voter participation records, really going back for a century or so. Whatever else you want to say about this election, there was just an extraordinary amount of interest in the democratic process, strong feelings on both sides about the merits of the two candidates. And so for those who worry about the future of American democracy and people not taking part in the process. That is not a problem. The bad news is that the election isn't over as at least as far as one of the two candidates is concerned. President Trump's refusal to concede, his allegations that the process was rigged claims of widespread fraud, and his legal efforts to reverse the results in the vote count in several states, all of that is truly unprecedented. In recent American history, and is deeply damaging to the legitimacy of the process and I think the worries that many people have overseas about this are fully warranted. So what we've seen over the past couple of weeks is this bizarre spectacle, where on the one hand world leaders have been calling Joe Biden to congratulate him on his victory. And he's been meeting with advisors and announcing senior appointments in the White House beginning to put together a cabinet. They're actually physically putting together the reviewing stand on the street in front of the White House for President Biden's election. Well at the same time inside the White House you have the incumbent president, hunkered down, carrying out a purge of officials in his own administration, and tweeting out a series of tweets about developments in his legal battle to contest the outcome. His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is busy filing lawsuits in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, either seeking to invalidate votes, or to persuade election boards in various states to refuse to certify the results. What's more worrying about this perhaps is the Republican Party's complicity in the effort. You have senators like Lindsey Graham who was recently reelected in South Carolina, who has joined the effort to pressure election officials in Georgia, and elsewhere to purge votes. You have the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying the other day he claims it was a joke but saying that he's happy to take part in quote a peaceful transition to a second Trump term. And so you have the other party, the Republican Party, sort of actively enlisted in President Trump's effort to block the outcome. And he, Trump will not permit anyone in his administration to engage with President elect Biden's team on transition planning. So Joe Biden has been forced to convene ad hoc groups of experts to discuss issues like national security and the pandemic. But no one from his team has been able to meet with anybody at the White House or any government agency to begin the process of transferring authority for the government to a new administration. Now on one level, this is not as big a problem as it would have been with a less experienced candidate. Joe Biden really knows his way around the White House, the people he has in top positions are deeply steeped in policy and in governance. Most of them have had senior level jobs in the White House during the Obama administration. So this is an administration that can hit the ground running. There is a precedent for this level of confusion during a transition in 2000 as many of you remember the outcome in Florida was contested through early December of 2000, and there was no transition planning between the candidate Al Gore, and the Republican winner George W. Bush. The difference there was that George Bush had the lead and and you know was the presumed victor of that election to many people through that whole period of confusion. Here you have a situation where most independent observers think there's no contested outcome, and the incumbent shows absolutely no signs of ever conceding the outcome. So it is quite likely that this kind of standoff will continue well beyond the various normal signposts that you would see in certifying the results of an election in early December. Here the electoral college usually meets and formally cast their votes in favor of the victor that would usually draw a line under even a contested process. In this case it will be interesting to see whether President Trump is willing to recognize that as the end of the election or whether he will continue to dispute the outcome, all the way through inauguration day. And if he does, President elect Biden may face the prospect of walking into the White House on January 20, not having any proper meetings with members of the Trump administration. So we'll see how that plays out. In terms of where I think things are going to go, I think that after all of this storm and drum is over, President elect Biden will be inaugurated on January 20, he will enter the White House, and we will have a new president. The question is, what more shenanigans, what more damage can be done between now and then and what is President Trump's motive in doing all of this. I think there's a couple of different things at play here. One is President Trump is using this period to settle scores. He has fired the entire civilian leadership of the Pentagon, for example. He's fired the official in the Homeland Security Department who oversees election integrity. And so there seems to be an effort to really go after people in his administration he deems inadequately loyal. There's talk that he might also fire the director of the FBI and the director of the CIA. So we're in for this period of real instability and uncertainty on the personnel front. President Trump is also using this period to make some fairly critical national security decisions that will affect the incoming administration. He's expected to announce a fairly full scale withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq that's something he's wanted to do for much of his presidency and he seems determined to get it done before he walks out the door on January 20. But above all, there was also talk in the past couple of days in our newspaper reported this, that he asked his military advisors for options to carry out a strike on nuclear installations in Iran, which obviously would be a deeply destabilizing thing to do in the waning weeks of an administration. It appears that his own advisors, including Mike Pompeo, talked him out of this, but there are these very, you know, momentous decisions that President Trump still seems determined to make during these closing weeks of his presidency. But above all, I think Trump is laying the groundwork for a post presidential political career by refusing to ever acknowledge defeat. I think he aims to mobilize the 73 million American voters who who voted for him to continue to be, if you will, a sort of a MAGA army, make America great again army, a group of supporters that he can galvanize and mobilize, whether they report him for a return bid for the presidency in 2024, or whether it's just to ensure that he will play a king making role in the Republican Party, in effect anointing whoever might run for the Republican nomination the next time around. I think by refusing to admit he lost this election, he believes it will secure his position to play this continuing pivotal role in American politics so to answer a question that may come up later, I think we've not seen the end of Donald Trump far from it, and a lot of what he's doing in these closing weeks seems designed to help him secure his position. A few words on Joe Biden, where does this leave Joe Biden, pardon me, and what can we expect from a Biden presidency. I would say a couple of things. One, as I said before, Joe Biden will hit the ground running. He will be the most experienced president we've elected in modern times. He has deep relationships with dozens of world leaders. He also has deep relationships in Congress and across the aisle, and Joe Biden is one of a vanishing species in American politics he's a moderate, who believes strongly that he can work across the aisle. So I think we will see him reach across the aisle and attempt to make relationships with Republicans with the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and with others, perhaps even Lindsey Graham, and whether he succeeds at that will tell you a little bit about the kind of presidency he's going to have. History will suggest it'll be a very tough slog for him his predecessor, Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama whom he served as vice president was never able to establish relationships and it really limited what Obama was able to accomplish legislatively when he was president. He really, after losing the brief period of time when he had a Democratic Senate, Obama was reduced to really carrying out most of his presidency through executive actions. And the problem with executive actions as the Trump presidency demonstrated is they're very easy for a successor to unwind. So, I think the early drama of the of the Biden presidency will be whether he's able to build any relationship with Republicans. The other key variable in the next few weeks is what kind of a Senate will Joe Biden deal be facing. It looks very much like the Republicans will cling to a very narrow majority in the Senate and retain control, but that's not a done deal. There are two special elections looming in the next six weeks in Georgia that could actually change the balance in the Senate. If both of these special elections are won by Democrats, the Democrats would emerge with a 5050 tie in the new Senate and of course in a 5050 tie. The party that holds the White House controls the Senate because the tie breaking vote is cast by the vice president. In this case, Kamala Harris. So these two elections are going to be crucial to determining whether Joe Biden's dealing with them, the narrowest of Democratic majorities in the Senate or with a Republican Senate and so you're going to see an enormous amount of money flowing into these two races, a huge amount of media interest in them. I think you're going to start hearing a lot about the Reverend Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff who are the two Democratic challengers in these races and a lot about the two Republican incumbents David Purdue and Kelly Loeffler so get used to those names they're going to be on your radar screen, at least for the next six weeks or so. Once we get past that. Joe Biden will have an incredibly full plate both domestically and in foreign policy domestically of course the number one priority the overwhelming priority is trying to mobilize a federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. It's almost a total breakdown in the federal response since the election. President Trump has not attended a meeting of his own coronavirus task force for something like five months. He doesn't really talk about the virus at all, because he's so preoccupied by his own electoral future. And so you really are now seeing that the virus is being almost completely dealt with on a state level. But you're going to see under Joe Biden, a huge federal reinsertion into this whole debate, I think he'll probably start off by issuing some kind of a federal mandate to wear face masks, incredibly after all this time, and all the evidence. Many states in the US still don't do that. And some are openly hostile to the idea of wearing face masks I think you'll see Biden, try to pull the nation together around that as a minimum step. A major theme of his early presidency will be of course, the prospects for a vaccine, and once a vaccine is is in the market, how quickly it can be distributed nationwide. And so I think you'll see Joe Biden talk most about the virus in the early weeks of his presidency on the foreign policy front, and of more issue interest to this audience. I think you'll see Biden with a somewhat freer hand than he has on domestic policy presidents historically can do more overseas than they can domestically when faced with an unfriendly Congress. So I think there's some stuff he will do right away I mean think of it as the low hanging fruit. He'll rejoin the Paris climate accord, which I think will be a source of relief to many in Europe and around the world. He'll strike down some of the more offensive laws that Trump put in place the ban on Muslims or visitors from majority Muslim countries. I think he'll strike that down probably in the first day or week of his presidency. He will try to go in and address some of the more morally repugnant elements of the immigration law, such as the family separation policy that Trump has, has pursued in which has been become such a fraught issue. But other issues are going to be trickier. I think Biden would like to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal which you recall was negotiated by Barack Obama and pulled out of by Donald Trump. But that'll be tricky the Europeans would love to see him do it right away but it will probably require the Iranian government to make some concessions that it's not clear that the Iranians are willing to make. That would be diplomacy on the Iran front. I think Biden will be very cautious on multilateral trade agreements. I think for example the Trans Pacific Partnership, also something his predecessor was very pivotal and negotiating and Trump pulled out of. I see him move more slowly on some of these deals because trade has become a much more complicated issue politically within the Democratic Party than it was even four or eight years ago. So for those who assume that Biden will be, you know, the return of multilateral trade agreements I guess I would urge a little bit of caution for this audience for an Irish audience. Biden's victory is really an unqualified positive. I don't need to tell this audience, Joe Biden is a proud Irish American. It's almost become a joke among members of his staff about how long he can go in any public remarks without quoting either Yates or Seamus Heaney. So we know where his heart is on issues related to Ireland and that does have a concrete implication for the ongoing trade negotiation that the UK is involved in with the European Union. So Biden's has already made it very clear to Boris Johnson that he doesn't want to see anything in that trade negotiation that would put at risk the future of the Good Friday Agreement. And so you not only have a democratic contingent in Congress that's looking out for Ireland on this issue which has always been there, but you now have a Democrat in the White House or you will shortly have a Democrat in the White House that will have Ireland's back on this issue. And I think that in White Hall, the recognition of that is really setting in and I think the British government recognizes that it has to move carefully here and it's going to raise some difficult decisions for the Johnson government in the coming weeks. What does it do about the Internal Market Act in the event that it doesn't make a deal with Brussels. There are some who believe that in fact the complications arising from this may make the Johnson government more likely to cut the deal it needs to with the European Union in the next few weeks so we'll see. On the level of symbolism I wouldn't be at all surprised to see an early Joe Biden visit to Ireland in the opening months of his presidency along the lines of the Obama visit that Michael alluded to earlier. That visit didn't happen until 2011 I'd be surprised if you didn't see Joe Biden earlier in his presidency. But then one final thing that I'll end on. I think some of the angst in London about what a Biden presidency means for the US UK relationship is a little bit overdone. Under the day Joe Biden is an Atlanticist he's a president who grew up a foreign policy figure who grew up understanding the value of transatlantic relations. He will want to reaffirm alliances in the opening months of his presidency with the EU yes but also with NATO, of which Britain is probably the most important partner to the United States. So I think that once Britain in the US navigate the issue of Ireland in the Brexit negotiations, there are many areas where Britain in the US can hope to work together, whether it's on reaffirming the value of NATO, which has been cast into a question during the Trump years, whether it's working on reaffirming democratic values in places like Hong Kong or with reference to Russia, or whether it's working together on climate policies in the run up to the cop 26 conference in Mexico next November I think there are a number of places where Britain and the US can hope to work together well. So, while I don't minimize the role that Ireland and Brexit could play and there as an irritant in the relationship I think there are more reasons to be optimistic and pessimistic and some of the hand wringing that I've detected in the last few weeks in the British press about this might be a little bit exaggerated. So, with that I'm happy to stop. Take questions from Michael and any of you, and I look forward to the Q&A. Thanks.