Former president Barack Obama said in a live interview hosted by The Washington Post that there has been “some damage done” as a result of the Trump administration’s foreign relations tactics and expressed optimism that members of Biden’s incoming administration could begin to repair divisions sown between the United States and its global allies.

Obama praised Antony Blinken, who Biden has selected to be his secretary of state, as “outstanding” and a “skilled diplomat, well regarded around the world.”

Blinken served as deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration and is one of Biden’s closest and longest-serving foreign policy advisers.

“You’re seeing a team develop that I have great confidence in,” Obama said.

Obama was interviewed by Washington Post opinions columnist Michele Norris and Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It’s the first live interview of the tour for his new memoir, “A Promised Land.” The book is the first of an expected two volumes that will chronicle his two terms in the White House.

“It’s going to be important to recognize the confidence that our allies had and the world had in American leadership is not going to be restored overnight,” he said in the interview. “They’re going to be greatly relieved and pleased to see people like Tony, you know, at various conferences around the world and returning to the traditional leadership role that the U.S. has played.”

Biden plans to rejoin the Paris climate agreement and to revive the Iran nuclear deal soon after taking office. But Obama pointed to such reversal of positions during the Trump administration and said they could “create some inhibitions in terms of entering into agreements, not always being certain whether or not they will be reversed by future administration.”

“So there has been some damage done that is going to take some time to dig ourselves out of,” he said. “But there’s no doubt that Joe’s got the right people to do it, and I have every confidence they’ll be able to do it. It just may not happen instantaneously."

During the interview, the former president was also asked about recent developments on coronavirus vaccine candidates, including news that AstraZeneca is the third pharmaceutical company to announce remarkable late-stage trial results.

Obama said the challenge, once there is a vaccine, will be in distributing shots quickly and in ensuring that people are willing to get vaccinated.

“That is both a logistical and economic and public messaging challenge,” he said. “And look, it has not been made easier by the fact that we’ve had an incoherent federal communication strategy to say the least when it comes to science and the whole science around covid.”

He said one of the incoming Biden administration’s first tasks will need to be to “make sure we have clear protocols about who gets it first, whether it’s front-line workers, people who are most vulnerable. And then move forward from there.”

There will also need to be public messaging around vaccination, he said, that “counteracts whatever suspicions, conspiracy theories — the anti-vax Internet is pretty powerful.”

“We’re going to want to make sure we roll that out in a way that elicits trust from the public as much as possible,” he added.

In the book, Obama defends his legacy and details what motivated him and what at times left him distraught.

“I confess,” the 44th president of the United States says in the preface, “there have been times during the course of writing this book, as I reflected on my presidency and all that’s happened since, when I’ve had to ask myself whether I was too tempered in speaking the truth as I saw it, too cautious in either word or deed, convinced as I was that by appealing to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, I stood a greater chance of leading us in the direction of the America we’ve been promised.”