Diplomacy and International Politics

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."

Just two weeks ago, a tweet cost the global stock markets roughly $1.36 trillion (or Australia’s annual GDP). With 280 characters on Twitter, the U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to raise tariffs on select Chinese imports, instilling lower market confidence, triggering significant volatility, and exacerbating existing political uncertainties. To explore what is really at stake in Twitter diplomacy, it is important to explore why Twitter diplomacy matters, why world leaders use it, what it means for diplomatic relations, and how governments can manage the associated risks.

As part of the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship’s (PETR) event series, Ambassador Romana Vlahutin, Ambassador at Large for Connectivity in the European External Action Service, addressed the EU’s new Connectivity Strategy in conversation with Philippe Le Corre, PETR affiliate and senior fellow with Harvard Kennedy School's Mossavar-Rahmani Center on Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Natalie Jaresko (MPP ’89), former Finance Minister of Ukraine, returned to Harvard on October 31^st, 2016 to take part in the Future of Diplomacy Project’s international speaker series. In a public seminar moderated by Faculty Director Nicholas Burns, Jaresko, who currently serves as chairwoman of the Aspen Institute Kyiv, reflected on her time in office from 2014 to 2016. In her two years in office, the Ukrainian government  had to contend with the Russian annexation of Crimea, a national debt crisis, widespread governmental corruption, and political instability.