Diplomacy and International Politics

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright joins longtime colleague and friend Ambassador Nicholas Burns for a conversation about her life, the dangers facing modern democracies, and America’s role in what she calls “a brand new world.” Reflecting on her childhood in London during the Blitz, her journey to America as a refugee, and her long career as a diplomat, Secretary Albright is facing the current crises and ongoing work with outspoken determination. “It took me a long time to find my voice,” she says,”I’m not going to shut up now.” A self-described worried optimist and grateful American, Albright offers an urgent message for the unprecedented times we are living in.

For decades, the Munich Security Conference served as a powerful symbol of the strength of the Western alliance. The 2020 installment offered a testament to its accelerating decline.

NATO is neither “brain dead” nor in crisis.  Rather, the alliance is at a turning point much like others it has faced before in its seventy-year history.  Change is central to the story of how NATO has endured. 

As every year the General Assembly will have to address the multitude of problems in the world from the war in Yemen and the conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, the turmoil in Venezuela to the challenges of development. But this year it must in addition focus on trends that threaten the very basis of world order.

Thirty years ago this week, on August 23, 1989, more than 2 million citizens of the Baltic republics of the U.S.S.R. engineered one of the most dramatic and successful mass protests in Soviet history.

Professor Burns speaks about the resignation of U.K. Ambassador to the U.S. 

The political scientist Karl Kaiser has warned against the blockade of a European defense policy by Germany.

In the 60s, Karl Kaiser went to Harvard to work for Henry Kissinger, and later, as a political scientist and SPD member, he advised the chancellors of the party on foreign policy issues. In conversation, he remembers his time with Willy Brandt and explains how he underestimated Donald Trump.

America and WWII Allies triumphed on D-Day by working together. Trump is the first president in 75 years who doesn't see the value in reliable friends.

I saw first-hand the value of our alliance with Europe on 9/11 when I was the new American Ambassador to the Alliance.  When we were hit hard in New York and Washington D.C., the allied Ambassadors came to me in Brussels that afternoon to pledge their support for us when we needed them most.  They pledged to invoke the alliance’s collective defense clause—Article 5 of the NATO Treaty—that an attack on one would be considered an attack on all.