Diplomacy and International Politics

Trump administration claims of progress in talks with the Taliban have sparked fears even among the president's allies that his impatience with the war in Afghanistan will lead him to withdraw troops too soon, leaving the country at risk of returning to the same volatile condition that prompted the invasion in the first place.

Former ambassador Nicholas Burns, Harvard Kennedy School professor, predicts a 'fractured' Iraq for the next five or ten years.

Nicholas Burns's April 7 op-ed in the weekend edition of the Financial Times on the U.S. cruise missile strikes against the Syrian Air Force. His major points are:

• He supports President Trump's decision. The U.S. should not tolerate Asad's use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.
   
• The Trump Administration needs a strategy for what comes next. They may consider working with Turkey to establish safe havens for civilians protected by a No Flight Zone. This carries enormous risk. Tread carefully.
   
• The U.S. should push hard to resume UN-sponsored negotiations for a cease-fire and an eventual settlement to end the war. It may take years. But this is how the war will end.
   
• Trump should reverse course and admit Syrian refugees into the U.S. This is the most direct way to help in the most horrific refugee crisis since World War Two.
   
• Finally, this often brash and impulsive President should not conclude that the Syria strikes can be replicated easily elsewhere, such as in North Korea.  

On Thursday, President Trump ordered a military strike on "the airfield in Syria where the chemical weapons attack was launched." He said that "it is in the vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons." It was the first direct American assault on President Bashar al-Assad's regime since the Syrian civil war began six years ago.

Nicholas Burns talks with WBUR/Radio Boston. 

Reports suggest Syria’s president Bashar Al-Assad was behind this week’s deadly chemical weapons attack that left dozens of people dead, some of them children. Guests Nicholas Burns and Gary Samore weigh-in: Should the U.S. and other Western nations act now to protect Syrians from further harm?

Jake Sullivan, Future of Diplomacy Project Senior Fellow, in conversation with Faculty Director Nicholas Burns, attempts to deconstruct the logic behind President Trump's foreign policy decisions.

"Offshore balancing has not failed in the Middle East because it hasn't been U.S. strategy for almost a generation. The United States did act like an offshore balancer from 1945 to about 1990: It had vital interests in the region and wanted to prevent any state (including the Soviet Union) from controlling the Gulf. But it pursued this goal first by relying on Great Britain (until 1967) and then by turning to local allies like the shah of Iran. After the shah fell in 1979, the United States created the Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) so it could affect the balance of power swiftly and directly and thus deter a possible Soviet foray into the Gulf. But it didn't park the RDF in the Gulf or elsewhere in the region; instead, it kept it offshore and over the horizon and didn't use it until Iraq seized Kuwait in August 1990."

"...[B]y far the worst argument for intervening in Syria is the suggestion that greater U.S. involvement is necessary to preserve U.S. credibility, to maintain its reputation as a distinctly moral great power, or to preserve the respect of allies and adversaries alike. The historical record shows that not intervening in humanitarian tragedies has had little impact on America's standing in the past, and the same is true today."

"The unprecedented combination of political chaos, cross-cutting military confrontations, and strategic contradictions in northern Syria reached a record-setting point two days ago. That was when Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, and the Department of Defense (DoD) said, 'we call on all armed actors to stand down and take appropriate measures to deconflict and open channels of communication.'"