Diplomacy and International Politics

In this installment of “Conversations in Diplomacy," the Future of Diplomacy Project's Faculty Chair Nicholas Burns is joined by Congressman Joe Kennedy III (D-MA), representative of the fourth congressional district of Massachusetts, for a conversation about convincing American voters that foreign policy matters. 

We have the most solipsistic president in American history offering up the most solipsistic foreign policy ever at a time when the me-me-me generation are busy taking selfies and other pols the planet over are trying to play that self-centeredness to their advantage. Have we reached Peak Solipsism? And what does that mean for the international system. We discuss in honor of and in the context of this week’s meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York City with David Rothkopf in New York, Ambassador Nicholas Burns in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Rosa Brooks in Washington, DC and Kori Schake in London, England.

In this installment of “Conversations in Diplomacy," the Future of Diplomacy Project's Faculty Chair Nicholas Burns is joined by Congressman Joaquin Castro (TX-20), for a special edition podcast episode on President Trump's incoherent foreign policy.

US diplomats have the job of explaining America's policies to the world. That job gets harder when Washington and the White House appear to be in turmoil. And, after the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria, thousands of Puerto Ricans left the island to try and get on with their lives on the US mainland. We check in with some students a year later to see where they've ended up. Plus, The World's Shirin Jaafari gives us an update on her upcoming series from Afghanistan and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' visit to the country.

David Greene talks with Amanda Sloat about President Trump's recent hard-line stance with Turkey which sparked an economic crisis for the country.

Amanda Sloat, Robert Bosch senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, and Nahal Toosi foreign affairs correspondent at Politico, discuss how tensions have been simmering between the U.S. and Turkey, and how Turkey's refusal to release an American pastor hasn't helped. They also discuss the Trump administration's new sanctions and tariffs on Turkey, and why the deteriorating relationship is a problem.

The United States is hitting Russia with new sanctions to punish President Vladimir Putin's government for using a nerve agent against a former spy and his daughter in Britain. The US State Department says the Trump Administration has determined that Russia has used chemical or biological weapons in violation of international law, but the action comes five months after the US expelled more than 50 Russian diplomats in retaliation for the same poisoning.

Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and current professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Nicholas Burns helps explain what happened in Helsinki (and since), the damage being done to the U.S., and our position in the world.

Former US ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns speaks with AM's Kim Landers. He describes the Brussels NATO summit as "messy" and "divisive" due to President Trump's adversarial stance, which he says was an attempt to signal to his supporters at home that he was standing up to Europe. He describes Mr Trump's threats of leaving the treaty as "preposterous."