foreign policy article on 4 minutes nuclear time

#Foreign policy article on 4 minutes nuclear time free#

For some, it's dealing with Chinese human rights and democratic infractions.

I think it's almost hard to describe what the policy is. INSKEEP: You don't seem to think that the U.S. But even if everything goes our way with China, it's not going to deal with any of the problems I just mentioned. So what I'm struck by is the gap between what's going on in the world and the arrangements we're trying to put into place and, instead, what I mainly see is a focus on China, which is necessary. And I simply don't see a serious effort on our part, whether in this case it's to produce and distribute vaccines around the world, to do something about climate change, to do something about North Korean or Iranian nuclear weapons. HAASS: What's wrong with the way we're trying to correct it now is we're doing less in the world at just a time that COVID and climate change showed that what happens in the world directly affects us. What is wrong with the way they're trying to correct it? And now three state presidents have tried to correct that. INSKEEP: So you're saying that after the Cold War, there was a period of several decades where the United States wasted its opportunities, didn't get a lot done. After the - what you might call the drift of the Clinton years, the overreach of the Bush 43 years, we've now had three presidents in a row who were dialing it back and are reducing America's involvement in the world. I think we can actually start talking about what I would call a post-post-Cold War foreign policy. There was a hope that China would become more open politically, more market-oriented economically, would continue on a relatively benign course in terms of its foreign policy. You see it most with China - a much, much more muscular policy towards China. But I think you're arguing something deeper - that American public opinion more broadly, the foreign policy consensus, as you call it, is moving in the direction these three presidents are taking it. INSKEEP: We think of administrations in terms of personalities, and the personalities have been very different for the last three presidencies. I mean, we're talking the talk on democracy. The Uighurs in China along with the people in Hong Kong are living under extraordinarily repressive rule. Even democracy - even though we talk about it a lot more, well, when push came to shove, we didn't do anything to help the people in Cuba. We've said any number of demonstrations of American unilateralism, most recently with France over a submarine deal, also the way the United States got out of Afghanistan was positively Trumpian. What's not so different is the actual foreign policy. He's gotten the United States back into the Paris climate process. He talks about getting back into the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. That's obviously very different from Donald Trump. He's described the world as a fight or a battle between democracy and authoritarianism. INSKEEP: Hasn't Joe Biden changed the words that are used to describe U.S.

#Foreign policy article on 4 minutes nuclear time free#

And suddenly we're against, quote-unquote, 'forever wars.' We're getting out of the Middle East or Afghanistan, a real suspicion of free trade and the turning inward. And in their own ways, what they've all done is introduced a counterreaction. Bush and large role of the United States in the world in terms of Iraq, Afghanistan, trying to transform other societies into democracies. All three of them were reactions to what they saw - correctly, I would argue - as the overreach of George W. RICHARD HAASS: All three of them had a domestic-first bias. Why would you say the past three presidents have not been that different in their foreign policy direction? He says three very different presidents - Obama, then Trump, then Biden - have been pushing the United States in the same direction. In the magazine Foreign Affairs, Haass argues that in recent years, many people in that establishment have developed a bipartisan consensus about the world that is wrong.

foreign policy establishment - you know, diplomats and officials, some of them famous, many not, who engage with the world and wield influence as they go in and out of government over time. It's a private group that includes a great deal of the U.S. Haass is the head of the Council on Foreign Relations. But Richard Haass argues that their approach to the world is less different than it seems. How much did the United States really change foreign policy when it changed presidents? Joe Biden is a very different person from Donald Trump.