Diplomacy and International Politics

Foreign Affairs has recently published a number of articles on how the United States should engage with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, extremist forces within the regime, how the West can help ordinary Afghans, and the fate of the country’s women. To complement these essays, Foreign Affairs asked a broad pool of experts for their take. As with previous surveys, Foreign Affairs approached dozens of authorities with expertise relevant to the question at hand, along with leading generalists in the field. Participants were asked to state whether they agreed or disagreed with a proposition and to rate their confidence level in their opinion. Two Belfer Center experts participated, International Security Executive Editor Jacqueline L. Hazelton and Future of Diplomacy Project Senior Fellow Paula Dobriansky.

The following is an event write-up about the recent Future of Diplomacy Project (FDP) seminar on “The Future of Ukraine: Reconstruction, Energy Security, and Innovation” moderated by Ambassador Paula J. Dobriansky, Senior Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project. 

The Project on Europe hosted a post-COP 26 discussion about how European integration of a climate change agenda is now at the very center of its political project. Europe is exiting almost two decades of existential crisis during which it lost its narrative: it no longer had a compelling story to tell. It has now found it once again. Today, a green Europe represents a normative vision, an economic growth strategy, as well as a route to a political Union: it promises to be the new narrative to revive the European project. Precisely because it is so existential for the future of Europe, getting both the story and the practice right is crucial. This is a tall order.

A normative vision for the future, it represents both a clear growth strategy and a route to a political union for the bloc. Yet, as has been made clear at the U.N.’s Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow this week, the EU — responsible for only around 8 percent of global emissions — is but a small part of the global picture. And a green Europe can only be realized if it’s a global one too.  

The first 100 days are key to understanding where any presidency is going. Now more than a third of the way into that timeframe, how is President Joe Biden doing in the international policy arena? The World’s host Marco Werman speaks with Nicholas Burns, a former US under secretary of state for political affairs and a former ambassador to NATO.

Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns and former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes join Andrea Mitchell to talk about Biden's next steps on Iran and Russia. Burns says that Biden's "speech today at the Munich Security Conference has put the United States squarely back on center stage globally."

On November 12, 2020, the Future of Diplomacy Project hosted a discussion with Dame Karen Pierce, Ambassador of the United Kingdom to the United States about the major foreign policy challenges facing the UK and the US after the 2020 election, including climate, free trade and international leadership in a seminar moderated by Faculty Chair, Nicholas Burns.

The spread of the coronavirus is scary everywhere. But in Syria, which has faced war for more than nine years, humanitarian aid and health care is already stretched razor-thin.

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. 

President Trump’s Iran policy, even if it does not lead to war, is one of the worst examples of self-inflicted harm and collateral damage to the international community in the history of US foreign policy.