Global Summitry Podcasts

This Series undertakes interviews with academics, policymakers and in particular former officials exploring the current and past architecture of summits and the state of global order policy-making.

This podcast with Oliver Stuenkel is a full conversation exploring the hemispheric summit – the ‘Summit of the Americas’ and the regional politics of Latin America. Recently, leaders in the Western Hemisphere met for the 8th Summit of the Americas in Lima Peru. President Trump decided to avoid the Summit, the first American President to do so since this triennial meeting of leaders was inaugurated by President Bill Clinton. In fact, less than half the leaders showed. What does this poor attendance suggest about the state of regional relations? Equally, what does the crisis in Venezuela tell us about the state of relations and hemispheric concerns about democracy? The spotlight is on Latin America. The G20 is being hosted by the Argentinian Government. And there are important elections in the region, most notably in Brazil. The crisis in Venezuela is unlikely to end any time soon.

Oliver is an associate professor of international relations at Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in Sao Paulo. There, with a number of his colleagues, he is launching a new School of International Relations. Oliver has written extensively on the politics of the rising powers, including his most recent for Polity, Post-Western World: How Emerging Powers are Remaking the Global Order. He is a frequent commentator on the Hemisphere in journals and in the media across the region.

In this ‘Now’ podcast we explore the state of politics in South Africa and the continuing role of South Africa in international relations.

South Africa has just gone through dramatic political change. First, Cyril Ramaphosa, long a member of the African National Congress (ANC), and a close colleague to Nelson Mandela, gained the presidency of the ANC. And then Ramaphosa and his colleagues were able to ‘ease out’ Jacob Zuma from the post of President of South Africa that Zuma has held for the last 9 years. The ANC will face national elections in 2019 with Cyril Ramaphosa likely as the President.

In the face of these changes I invited two colleagues and friends from South Africa to explore the impact of these changes and assess the prospects for Ramaphosa and his Party. Chris Alden is a professor of international relations at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. My other colleague is Maxi Schoeman. She was a professor and head of the political sciences department at the University of Pretoria and is currently the deputy director of postgraduate studies and ethics at the faculty of humanities at the University of Pretoria. Both have been deeply involved in researching and writing on the domestic and foreign policy of South Africa over the years.

South Africa remains a critical actor on the African continent and is a member of the BRICS and the G20. Come listen to this ‘Now’ podcast.

This podcast with Stewart Patrick was done while Stewart was visiting us here at the Munk School of Global Affairs to talk to about his new book, Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World. In the ‘plush’ podcast studio, Stewart and I sat down to explore what the book tells us about American foreign policy and the impact of Donald Trump on American international behavior. In addition, we explore with Stewart the consequences of a Trump ‘America First’ foreign policy for America’s role in the eight summits that are scheduled for this coming year. Are we likely to see the kind of hectoring that Donald Trump exhibited in the NATO Summit last year? Or, will President Trump exhibit more collaborative behavior? We explore whether the United States is likely to remain the ‘odd man out’ in the two major Informal summits - the G7 taking place in Canada, hosted by Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau in the spring, and the G20 that will gather in Buenos Aires in the late fall hosted by Mauricio Macri, President of Argentina. What impact is President Trump likely to have on global governance and the liberal international order that the United States has led through the decades since World War II.

Stewart is the James H Binger Senior Fellow in Global Governance at the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington. Stewart is also the director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program at CFR and Stewart writes the blog “The Internationalist” at the CFR website.

In this podcast Peter Feaver examines closely the Trump Administration’s first National Security Strategy or NSS. What does the NSS tell us, and not tell us about the Trump Administration’s foreign and security policy. Additionally, we have the opportunity to question Peter on Trump trade policy, his policy toward the Korean Peninsula and Iran and more generally Trump’s policies towards allies and adversaries. Peter is a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University. He is the Director there of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies and also Director of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy. In 2005 to 2007 served as Special Advisor for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform at the NSC. Peter has written extensively on civil-military relations, nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy. It is a close examination of Trump foreign policy.

In this podcast, Matthew Goodman, gives us a tour de force of Trump policy in Asia and the ‘big question’ what will be the consequences for the liberal international order of a Trump administration. Matthew is currently the William E Simon Chair in Political Economy and the Senior Adviser for Economics at CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Matthew has served in both the private sector at Goldman Sachs and Albright Stonebridge Group and has also held a number of significant roles in the public sector including early in his career as an international economist at the U.S. Treasury Department and at the Tokyo Embassy. Subsequently, he was director of international economics on the National Security Council staff responsible for the G20 and, the then G8, and then former White House Coordinator for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the East Asia Summit (EAS). Matthew and I explore the consequences of Trump’s policy actions especially in Asia focusing on Trump’s meetings with key leaders in Japan, Korea and China and at the multilateral meetings, APEC and ASEAN. Listen to Matthew’s views of the ‘America First’ policy in Asia.

In this podcast Kori Schake tackles the main elements of the Trump Administration foreign and security policy. With Kori at the helm, we explore Trump’s policies in trade, the Korean peninsula, Iran and generally America’s leadership role – with allies and adversaries – in the liberal international order. Kori has operated close-in to U.S. military and security affairs with stints at the Defense Department, the National Security Council and the State Department during the first term of George W. Bush. She was as well a senior policy advisor to the McCain-Palin campaign in the 2008 Presidential election. Kori has also written insightfully on the US military, in fact with the current Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis. The book: Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Militaryand she is just releasing her latest, Safe Passage; The Transition from British to American Hegemony.

Joined by Steven Bernstein and Matthew Hoffmann.

In this podcast, we engage Harvard’s Joseph Nye Jr. in a wide-ranging conversation about cyber security. Joe has been at the forefront of the examination of critical issues in international relations. Recently, he has turned his attention to the impact of cyber security, cyber espionage and cyber warfare on international relations. Cyber has emerged as a critical feature of conflict in today’s international relations and the relationship of great powers including the United States, China and Russia. For further analysis of the cyber world see Trey Herr’s article here at Global Summitry called, “Governing Proliferation in Cybersecurity”. [Caroline can you add a url] Professor Nye is a Harvard University Service Professor, Emeritus and the former Dean of the Kennedy School. He has also served in various security positions in the American government. International relations scholars are well aware of his significant work in international relations including his examination of complex interdependence with Robert Keohane and Joe’s illumination of the concept of ‘soft power’ in international relations.

Jake Sullivan was the youngest head of Policy Planning in the State Department under the Obama Administration. During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections, Jake was Hillary Clinton’s policy advisor. In this podcast, Jake discusses Democratic alternatives to the Trump Administration’s policy in critical foreign policy areas such as trade and globalization. Jake also assesses the Trump Administration’s policy with respect to the crisis in the Korean Peninsula, Russia, alliance politics, and the institutions of liberal internationalism that the United States help construct over the last seventy years.

In this ‘Now’ podcast we get a chance to extend the examination of summits with two very eminent peace and conflict academics. Daniel Druckman and Peter Wallensteen prepared an article for Global Summitry that we published in Volume 2, Issue 2, entitled “Summit Meetings: Good or Bad for Peace?” The article sought to understand whether summit meetings between contending states have an impact on their relations that relate to war or conflict outcomes. The analysis and conclusions were drawn from a new data set that these scholars had created on summits between the Soviet Union, now Russia, and the United States. The data set covered summits between these two great powers that covered the period from 1943 to 2014. We collectively decided that with the recent G20 Leaders’ Summit in Hamburg it was a most opportune moment to examine the summit relationship historically and ‘in the moment’.

We do hope you enjoy this wide-ranging examination of Russian and American summits from Roosevelt and Stalin to Trump and Putin.