“A lot of the issues that we focus on as crises on a daily basis—I think particularly of Syria—they are certainly crises in their own right,” says Jeremy Shapiro. “But to my mind the failure to deal with them does have a lot to do with the consequences of the breakdown in international order and the breakdown in the international capacity to create order.”

Jeremy Shapiro, fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy and the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, gives his view on the top foreign policy issues of the day and in the 2016 presidential election.

“The interesting thing about terrorism is that it is never, at least for advanced societies, a direct threat in any existential way, despite what many of our politicians say,” argues Shapiro in this podcast, “What can threaten a nation like ours is that in the process of responding to an attack like in San Bernardino or in Paris that we destroy the things that are most precious to us, like our freedoms, like our civil liberties, that we engage in foreign policy adventures in order to try to make ourselves feel more secure and more safe that actually erode our power.”

Also in this podcast: The final installment of the Paris climate conference series by Bruce Jones, vice president and director of Foreign Policy at Brookings. And also stay tuned for our regular economic update with David Wessel, senior fellow and director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy.

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Show Notes:

Order from Chaos: Foreign policy in a troubled world

'What U.S. Foreign Policy Really Needs Is...'

Suzanne Maloney talks U.S.-Iran relations, the Iran nuclear deal, and the future of Iran  How Russia and America make the same mistakes in Syria How not to overreact to ISIS The perils of "French Islam": France’s misguided response to the Paris attacks _____________________________________________________

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