Diplomacy and International Politics

Ambassador Nicholas Burns speaks about the "devastating portrait" of President Trump's leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The American economy is in an artificial coma, unemployment is soaring, and estimates of corona deaths in the U.S. are appalling. The President is currently speaking to the press almost daily about the situation. In the podcast, Tyson Barker, Deputy Director and Fellow at Aspen Institute Germany, and David Deissner, Managing Director of Atlantik-Brücke, speak with Peter Rough, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Cathryn Clüver, Executive Director of the Future of Diplomacy Project and Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship, Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center, on the President's crisis management, the role of states in managing the pandemic, and more.

Dear America,

In London there is much talk of a new “spirit of the Blitz” in the face of another deadly threat to us all.

But 80 years on, that spirit is expressing itself very differently. When the Luftwaffe bombs fell, to continue with normal life was an act of patriotic defiance. Now as COVID-19 spreads, to continue with normal life is an act of punishable deviance.

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.

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.

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.”

February 7, 2020: With the advent of the digital age and the rise of Russia and China as global powers, the EU must do more to defend itself and its relationship with the United States, according to Janne Kuusela, Director General Janne Kuusela. In an event moderated by  Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, Executive Director of the Future of Diplomacy Project and the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship he explained why Finland could be a potential paradigm for the EU’s defense strategy. 

Since Watergate, presidents and their aides have warned that impeachment is destabilizing to foreign policy. But history suggests otherwise. Presidential scandals create uncertainty abroad, but the impeachment process itself seems to bring clarity and resolution.

On Thursday 17 October 2019, thousands of exasperated Lebanese citizens took to the streets of Beirut in protest. The spark was the government’s latest plan to impose taxes on the popular and free based application, WhatsApp. Yet the protests were in fact the consequence of a series of ongoing and related crises: a fiscal crisis of insufficient revenues; a debt crisis; a foreign currency shortage crisis; a developmental crisis of stagnating growth compounded by rising unemployment and cost of living. One can certainly add to this list an infrastructural crisis—most popularized by the 2015 garbage protests, but part and parcel of people’s everyday lives as experienced in the problematic provisioning of electricity, water, and more. Such crises are largely homegrown, in that they are the result of decades-long mismanagement of public funds, rampant corruption, and political polarization. They are however exacerbated by regional and international players.

Iraq is experiencing a pivotal moment. Protesters, mostly youths, have again taken to the streets in Baghdad and several southern provinces. They initially demanded jobs and an end to corruption. Now they are calling for the resignation of key government figures, the dissolution of parliament and provincial councils, electoral reforms, and a rewrite of the constitution.