Diplomacy and International Politics

In this installment of “Conversations in Diplomacy," the Future of Diplomacy Project's Faculty Director Nicholas Burns is joined by Sir John Sawers, the former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, for a conversation on tackling global security challenges in the digital age and the changing nature of intelligence agencies.

The Foreign Service, our country’s irreplaceable asset for understanding and interacting with a complex and dangerous world, is facing perhaps its greatest crisis. President Trump’s draconian budget cuts for the State Department and his dismissive attitude toward our diplomats and diplomacy itself threaten to dismantle a great foreign service just when we need it most.

Forty-four years after the United Kingdom entered into an often tempestuous but not always loveless union with Europe, Prime Minister Theresa May will trigger formal divorce proceedings Wednesday.

At the heart of the British position in these complex negotiations is a simple trade-off between sovereignty and prosperity.

This week, we discovered that Nicola Sturgeon’s answer to new divisions, grievances and borders is . . . more divisions, grievances and borders. Since the vote on 23 June last year, it has become fashionable for some on the “liberal left” south of the border to cope with their Brexit grief by supporting, for Scotland, more nationalism as the answer to nationalism. According to this perspective, the rise of nationalism across Europe is negative, except on this island.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis (Harvard BA ’89), president of the Greek opposition party Nea Dimokratia (New Democracy,) laid out his vision for a tough but achievable strategy to revitalize the Greek economy and strengthen the nation’s ties to the European Union in an October 13 seminar.

Sandri Gozi, Italian Undersecretary of State for European Affairs, joined the Future of Diplomacy Project on November 1 for a discussion titled “Italy, the EU and the US: A Conversation on Transatlantic Challenges.”

On 24 and 25 November 2016 experts from politics and academia, including FDP Executive director Cathryn Clüver, discussed the impact of Brexit on several policy areas in a series of workshops at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. All events took place under Chatham House rules.

Dr. Ian Bremmer, expert in political risk and founder of the Eurasia Group, gave a seminar sponsored by the the Future of Diplomacy Project on Thursday, November 9 at the Harvard Kennedy School, titled “Managing Risk in an Unstable World."

The Right Honourable Douglas Alexander offered his views on European security in a discussion moderated by FDP Executive Director Cathryn Cluver.