Asia & the Pacific

Stephen M. Walt asks the following question: Is the real problem that Washington can't trust others, or rather that other states can't trust it? 

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.

Ahead of President Trump's first State of the Union address, Professor Burns spoke with Meghna Chakrabarti on WBRU's Radio Boston to reflect on Trump's foreign policy decisions in the past year.

Nicholas Burns, Professor at Harvard Kennedy School and former US Under Secretary of State, looks at what lies ahead for global politics as well as current geopolitical risks. “The world is experiencing the most profound leadership transition in a generation,” states Burns, who adds that 2018 promises to be a year of significant challenge to global stability and peace.  


Nicholas Burns, former U.S. undersecretary of State, provides insight to top international trouble spots next year, including containing North Korea, China trade, and U.S. relations with Russia.

"The Divider-in-Chief seems entirely comfortable with — and maybe even a little envious of — the various autocrats who are richer or more powerful than he is (or both) and free from those inconvenient constitutional constraints and checks and balances that keep getting in the way of Trump's feuds, whims, and destructive impulses."

"...[T]here is a simple explanation for the decline in conquest that they do not consider, one that has nothing to do with law, norms, or the peace pact itself. Over the past century, the spread of nationalism from Europe to the periphery and an expanding global supply of small arms has dramatically increased the cost of conquering and subduing a foreign population and then incorporating them within one's own polity. Once the idea of national self-determination had spread around the globe, local populations were willing to fight and die to expel foreign occupiers, and the spread of small arms and high explosives made it much easier for them to make occupiers pay."

"If you want to understand the foreign policy of a great power, therefore (and probably lesser powers as well), a good place to start is to look at the great wars it has fought. And for most of the major powers, the last great war is still World War II. If one asks what this perspective to some contemporary powers, what might it reveal?"

"One overlooked feature in this ongoing tragedy is that Trump isn't wrong about everything. Some of his critics won't admit it, but several of the themes he sounded during the 2016 campaign — such as the need to rebuild America's deteriorating infrastructure — were correct (if far from original), and some of his foreign-policy instincts were sound even if his command of details was not. A minimally competent president could have made substantial progress on most if not all of these fronts, thereby leaving the country better off and enhancing his prospects for a second term."