Diplomacy and International Politics

A seminar with Frederic Wehrey, Senior Fellow, Middle East Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on his new book The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

A seminar with Safwan Masri, Executive Vice President for Global Centers and Global Development and Senior Research Scholar, School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Columbia University on his recent book, Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly from Columbia University Press.

The essence of global politics today, said career diplomat and Harvard professor Nicholas Burns in a speech at Bates College, is that no country can go it alone.

Issues like climate change, public health crises, the threat of chemical and nuclear weapons, and cyber attacks are transnational problems requiring transnational solutions. But while a global mindset is more necessary than ever, the United States’ highest leaders are drawing back from the world.

“We’re led by the first president since the 1920s who doesn’t believe that the United States has a fundamental responsibility to help the world be knit together, to be the first responders, to cope with the big problems and the small problems,” Burns said to a Bates audience on March 29.

New sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council on September 11 in response to North Korea’s latest nuclear test are “not significant enough,” according to R. Nicholas Burns, an Atlantic Council board member who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs in the George W. Bush administration.

Sanctions must be part of a “patient long-term strategy” that includes deterrence, working closely with allies, and negotiations, said Burns, laying out the United States’ options for dealing with the North Korean crisis.  

Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis, former Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, and José Antonio Sabadell, former Ambassador of the European Union to Mauritania, have been named Fellows with the Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. DeLaurentis has been named Senior Diplomatic Fellow and Sabadell will be the first Rafael del Piño-MAEC (Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation) Fellow at the Future of Diplomacy Project. His fellowship is supported by a grant by the Rafael del Piño Foundation based in Madrid, Spain.

For the first time during the Syrian civil war, the US has shot down a Syrian aircraft. In response, Russia has threatened to target any aircraft, including US aircraft, that fly west of the Euphrates River.

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Farah Pandith, senior fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project and adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, about the evolution of presidential rhetoric on acts of terrorism and the groups that perpetrate them.

It was just one year ago that then-President Obama, seeking a modus vivendi with Tehran, said that America’s Gulf allies need to “share the Middle East” with the Iranians. That view of the Middle East was decisively repudiated this week, with Trump clearly aligning the United States with the majority of the Sunni Arab world, and Israel, against Iran.