Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has a point to make about America’s competitive future.

“We need a new generation of corporate statesmen like Pete Peterson, David Rockefeller, Bob Rubin, Don Marron,” he said over lunch, referring to, respectively, the former commerce secretary and current CFR chairman; the scion of the Rockefeller family; the former Treasury secretary who’s now a vice chairman at Citigroup; and the former chairman of UBS in America who now heads the investment bank Lightyear Capital.

“America needs to integrate better into the global economy at a time of growing competition,” Mr. Haass said. “After all, American CEOs sell in the global economy. The business community ought to be attracted to globalization issues. There should be a debate about the trade deficit. But where are those voices?”

Where indeed?

Mr. Haass, who’s just published his 11th book – “The Opportunity: America’s Moment to Alter History’s Course” – presides over a think tank that is housed in a stately mansion and has 4,200 individual members, as well as 250 corporate members. Founded in 1921, CFR is often called the “American Establishment.”

That is why when the 53-year-old Mr. Haass speaks, people listen. He wears the gravitas of his position with elegance – and practiced ease. He is, after all, a veteran of American policymaking circles. He worked at the Pentagon during the Carter administration; at the White House as Middle East adviser to President George H.W. Bush; and at the State Department during the administrations of Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush.

In his new book, Mr. Haass highlights concerns such as American competitiveness; Third World debt (now more than $1.5 trillion); the need to establish a more open trade regime; the spread of infectious diseases like AIDS; the link between public health and human rights; and environmental security.

His worry about American competitiveness in the $17 trillion global-trade economy isn’t Cassandra-like. America’s annual share is about 40%, and the European Union’s share is almost that. China is catching up, too, by aggressively pushing its exports to the point of accumulating more than $650 billion in foreign-exchange reserves, nearly all of it in greenbacks. And though America’s expansion continues to outpace so many other countries’ growth, its 2004 trade deficit of $617 billion is likely to grow again this year.

Mr. Haass advocates an integrated approach by America toward the rest of the world.

“America, for all its strengths, cannot manage globalization by itself,” he said. “It’s necessary that we work well with other major powers, and with emerging economies such as China and India. For instance, it’s important that we see China not as an inevitable adversary but as a potential partner.”

His fluency in foreign-policy and economics issues flows not only from his professional experience in Washington, but also from his education. The Brooklyn-born Mr. Haass, the son of a financial analyst, Irving, and his wife, Marcella, did not set out to become a policy wonk when he enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio. But those were the Vietnam years, when the nation was riven by campus protests. “If you came of age in the late ’60s, you were inevitably influenced by the Vietnam debate,” Mr. Haass said.

It was also at Oberlin that he first read the Koran and the New Testament, works that sparked an abiding interest in the Middle East. Mr. Haass spent his junior year in Israel. It was only when he did graduate work at Oxford University that he became “intellectually more specific.”

Mr. Haass’s writing skills helped propel him through Washington’s policymaking circles. “I’m no Peggy Noonan, I don’t write with flourishes,” he said. “But I can write quickly and clearly, and I feel comfortable relating a general proposition to specific cases. My style is analytical.”

That style has its provenance in Mr. Haass’s youth, when he observed his father at work.

“He was a very rational analyst of stocks – he looked at the fundamentals of a company and then reached his own conclusions,” Mr. Haass said. “I try to see things as they are, the basics, and then arrive at conclusions. I don’t feel the need to force reality to conform to a template. It’s a question of temperament.”

The importance of temperament was something he captured in a management book that he wrote in 1999 while he was teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School, “The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur: How to be Effective in Any Unruly Organization.” The book remains a must-read in management courses, corporations, and nonprofit institutions.

At the nonprofit CFR, Mr. Haass has had the opportunity to put his principles into practice. He characterized his management style as “open and inclusive, one that invites feedback.”

Now that he holds one of the most coveted and influential positions in American public life, is there something that deeply affects him?

“I’m sorry that my parents aren’t alive to see this,” Mr. Haass said. “They would have been very proud.”