Diplomacy and International Politics

On April 6, 2022,  the Belfer Center's Future of Diplomacy Project and Indo-Pacific Security Project as well as the Center for Public Leadership hosted a hybrid seminar with Ambassador Shivshankar Menon, former National Security Advisor of India and former Foreign Secretary in India’s Ministry of External Affairs, and Ambassador Richard Verma, former U.S. Ambassador to India and Belfer Center Senior Fellow, on India’s foreign policy and U.S.-India relations in a changing world order. The discussion explored why India abstained from recent U.N. votes deploring Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, what that means for U.S.-India relations, both bilateral and through the Quad, and how the war in Ukraine will affect geopolitics in Eurasia and the Indo-Pacific. Gopal Nadadur, MPA/ID candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School moderated this conversation.

The Future of Diplomacy Project hosted a conversation with Julie Bishop, Fisher Family Fellow and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Australia, about China and Australia’s relationship, the increasing geopolitical role of the Quad, and how U.S. foreign policy should respond to China's rise on May 19, 2021. Research Director, Torrey Taussig moderated this discussion.

On November 17, Ambassadors Nicholas Burns, Marc Grossman, and Marcie Ries officially launched their report, “A U.S. Diplomatic Service for the 21st Century,”published as part of the American Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.  These distinguished career Foreign Service Officers, and report co-authors, shared their recommendations on how to rebuild, reform, and reimagine the U.S. Foreign Service so that America can have the strongest and most effective diplomatic service to defend our country and advance its interests. 

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.

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. 

How should the US and Australia plan for a future of both strategic competition and cooperation with China? How do we get the balance between them right? The distinguished American diplomat Nicholas Burns, the Lowy Institute’s 2019 Rothschild & Co Distinguished International Fellow, addressed these questions in the 2019 Owen Harries Lecture.

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.