Middle East & North Africa

NPR's All Thing Considered talked to Amanda Sloat, Fellow at the Belfer Center's Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship, about Turkey's investigation into the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

David Greene talks with Amanda Sloat about President Trump's recent hard-line stance with Turkey which sparked an economic crisis for the country.

Amanda Sloat, Robert Bosch senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, and Nahal Toosi foreign affairs correspondent at Politico, discuss how tensions have been simmering between the U.S. and Turkey, and how Turkey's refusal to release an American pastor hasn't helped. They also discuss the Trump administration's new sanctions and tariffs on Turkey, and why the deteriorating relationship is a problem.

The tense relationship between the United States and Turkey is reaching an inflection point. As the Turkish government has taken an increasingly authoritarian turn and made questionable foreign policy choices in recent years, Washington has tried to exercise strategic patience and engage Turkish leadership to resolve differences between the two countries. But that patience is wearing thin.

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.