Diplomacy and International Politics

Professor Nicholas Burns discusses President Trump's impeachment hearings on BBC World News.

Earlier this month, Iran further expanded its nuclear enrichment program, taking another step away from the nuclear accord it had signed with world powers in July 2015. Since President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the accord, on May 2018, and re-imposed U.S. sanctions, Iran’s economy has lost nearly 10 percent of its output. Although the economy appears to have weathered the initial storm, time is not on Iran’s side and its leaders see the gradual resumption of enrichment as a way to end the current stalemate without caving to U.S. demands.

Nicholas Burns Speaks with Wolf Blitzer on CNN about career diplomats appearing in the first public hearings.

As part of the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship’s (PETR) event series, Nicholas Burns, Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, moderated a conversation on the crisis in the transatlantic relationship with Ambassador Victoria Nuland, Senior Fellow on the Future of Diplomacy Project and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and Ambassador Philippe Etienne, Ambassador of France to the United States and diplomatic adviser to the President of the French Republic. 

The migration and refugee crisis is getting worse. Though the sudden influx of migrants into Europe in 2015/2016 did not repeat itself today’s overall figures speak for themselves: 26 million refugees worldwide, 800 thousand apprehensions at the US-Mexican border, 184 thousand asylum applications in Germany in 2018, 120 thousand in France and 581 thousand in the European Union.

The moral of this long, circuitous and often perplexing story is that a nation can only be effective in its foreign policy if it is grounded at home-- stable socially, self-confident and united in its foundational values.

Cathryn Clüver-Ashbrook speaks to NDR2 radio on the impact of U.S. Scretary of State Mike Pompeo's visit on the health of the German-American relationship and shares reflections on 30 years after the fall of the Berlin wall.

This week, Americans will hear directly from the officials who witnessed the Trump- Ukraine scandal as it unfolded.

Nicholas Burns speaks with John Berman from CNN's New Day on how Giuliani's back-channel diplomacy is complicating U.S. foreign policy.

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.