On July 1, Meghan O’Sullivan, Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs, will become Director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs. She will take the reins from Eric Rosenbach, Co-Director of the Center since 2017.

As recently as 18 months ago, many policymakers, academics, and pundits in the United States and Europe were waxing lyrical about the geopolitical benefits of the coming transition to cleaner, greener energy. They understood that the move away from a carbon-intensive energy system that relied on fossil fuels was going to be difficult for some countries. But on the whole, the conventional wisdom held that the shift to new sources of energy would not only aid the fight against climate change but also put an end to the troublesome geopolitics of the old energy order.

Hand-Off details the Bush administration’s national security and foreign policy as described at the time in then-classified Transition Memoranda prepared by the National Security Council experts who advised President Bush. Thirty of these Transition Memoranda, newly declassified and here made public for the first time, provide a detailed, comprehensive, and first-hand look at the foreign policy the Bush administration turned over to President Obama.

WASHINGTON — The world was a volatile place when President George W. Bush was leaving office. So on the way out the door, he and his national security team left a little advice for their successors:

India is a friend. Pakistan is not. Don’t trust North Korea or Iran, but talking is still better than not. Watch out for Russia; it covets the territory of its neighbor Ukraine. Beware becoming ensnared by intractable land wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. And oh yes, nation-building is definitely harder than it looks.

Last week, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin seemingly dashed Democrats’ hopes for congressional action to slow climate change. Sen. Bernie Sanders accused Manchin of “sabotag[ing] the president’s agenda”; Rep. John Yarmuth, when asked about the consequences of Congress not acting on climate change, said, “We’re all going to die”; and climate activists, as well as some Democrats in Congress, wondered if Manchin should be removed as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

In late 2017, Mexico made headlines as Italian company Enel bid what was then a world-record low price for renewable energy in the country’s third such energy auction. This development was possible due to the historical and sweeping energy reforms passed with broad support in Mexico in 2013. Then-President Enrique Peña Nieto had succeeded where previous Mexican presidents had failed, reversing decades of resource nationalism and overhauling the energy sector through constitutional reforms that gave the private sector a larger role and advantaged renewable energy in Mexico’s economy. The 2017 auction seemed to indicate Mexico’s bright future not only as a conventional oil producer, but also as a clean energy power.

Russian military action in Ukraine could trigger an energy crisis even more serious than the one already hitting Europe. As has been pointed out, should the West hit Russia with severe new sanctions, President Vladimir Putin could cut off natural gas exports, leaving the continent shivering through midwinter. Yet there is another potential weapon of Russia’s that’s been less discussed and might be very effective: An ability to disrupt global oil markets, which would directly hit U.S. consumers.

If you were wondering whether Europe is running out of options to deal with its continuing energy crisis, one of Britain’s largest energy suppliers just offered an answer.

What sounded so simple during last year’s presidential campaign has turned out, like everything related to Iran, to be quite complicated.

Following the release of a report from the U.S. intelligence community on the killing in 2018 of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, we asked several of our Saudi and international relations scholars to comment.  

In the wake of the Khashoggi report, how should the Biden administration recalibrate the U.S.-Saudi relationship?