Diplomacy and International Politics

What role does diplomacy play in the modern world order, and what are the characteristics of a good diplomat? Which countries are the great powers today, and which will lead in 2050? Does NATO have a role in helping manage the political, economic, and military challenges facing the United States? And why is morale reportedly at a low ebb in the State Department? In this episode, former ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns, the Goodman Family professor of the practice of diplomacy and international relations at Harvard Kennedy School, answers these questions and more, based on his long career in government service.

The pandemic will change the world forever. We asked 12 leading global thinkers for their predictions.

Often, crises are moments of truth. Some leaders prove in these moments to be up to the stakes, others collapse. The forces behind decisions, interests and ideologies become clearer. President Tump's solemn address to the American nation on Wednesday evening on the coronavirus crisis deserves a special mention. On that day, Donald Trump was preparing to put an end to the world economy as we knew it.

European capitals are taking a variety of steps individually to try to beat back the outbreak. But few countries are working together to combat the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. 

In recent years the crisis of the transatlantic relationship and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has become a common theme in media, and various scholars have frequently questioned the futures of both entities. Not only are the new sovereigntist and populist trends within the NATO members calling the relevance of the transatlantic relationship into question, but some have found a reason to identify a crisis in the transatlantic relationship from the rise of global actors and the emergence of China as a great power in particular. China’s economic recovery after its “century of humiliation” is reshaping the international geopolitics and shifting the economic epicenter of the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 

Europeans awoke on Thursday morning to news that President Donald Trump had announced the suspension of “all travel from Europe to the United States.” Blaming the European Union (EU) for failing “to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China,” Trump suggested “a large number of new [coronavirus] clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe.”

Review of Heidi Hardt. NATO's Lessons in Crisis: Institutional Memory in International Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 275 pp. $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-067218-8; $105.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-067217-1.

As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) marks its seventieth anniversary in 2019, it stands between a successful track record of longevity and an array of beguiling challenges. Taking stock of external threats to the alliance, internal discord among the allies, and looming challenges on both technological and geopolitical horizons, former US ambassadors to the alliance recently concluded that NATO at seventy is “an alliance in crisis.”

Even if his administration ends on January 20, 2021 Donald Trump will have created a destructive legacy in foreign and domestic policy the depth of which is unrivalled in modern American history. In three short years, the president has done profound damage to the country’s international credibility and its capacity for moral suasion – key ingredients of the soft power that made it the anchor of liberal western world order of which it was the chief architect 70 years ago. The trauma of the Trump administration’s assault on postwar order will resonate beyond the (first) four years of any Democratic administration and will deepen dramatically, should he be re-elected in November.

US President Donald Trump has appointed Richard Grenell, US ambassador to Germany, as acting director of national intelligence. It's a sensitive post overseeing 17 US spy agencies and has traditionally been filled by an intelligence professional. The World's Marco Werman speaks with Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Director of the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship and the Future of Diplomacy Project, Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook speaks to WDR 5 on micro-multilateralism and the impact of urban diplomacy global diplomacy, particularly on climate change.