Take-it-or-leave-it diplomacy

Apr 13, 2020

Why have the people who have made the biggest foreign policy mistakes of all time never had to face the music? Robert Amsterdam discusses the changing role of diplomacy and the US grand strategy in a post-pandemic world with Stephen Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, author of The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy. 

 

For Professor Walt, sustainable US foreign policy successes are win-win, not the result of overwhelming pressure campaigns: for diplomacy to work, “even if you’re getting most of what you want on most of the issues, you shouldn’t expect to get 100% of what you want.” He further predicts a further retreat from globalization in response to COVID-19: “At least in the short to medium term, the end result is going to be a world that is less open, less free, and less prosperous.”