Global Summitry Podcasts

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. Currently Jake is the Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, a senior fellow and Master in Public Policy faculty member at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire and a non-resident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Geoeconomics and Strategy Program. In addition, Jake is the co-chair, along with Ben Rhodes of the National Security Action an organization of former senior officials and policy experts, academics and civil servants dedicated to advancing American global leadership and opposing the reckless policies of the Trump Administration.

It is with pleasure that we welcome Jake back to the Global Summitry podcast (Listen to Jake at Episode 14 of ‘Shaking the Global Order: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump’). As listeners will know, GS has been concerned to understand what U.S. foreign policy should be with China in what appears to be a growing U.S.-China rivalry. There is probably no more critical policy issue for United States foreign policy than getting the relationship with China right. Jake has written a number of articles outlining what he sees as the direction of U.S.-China policy. Let’s join Jake in this discussion of U.S.-China foreign policy.

We were fortunate enough to have Sheri Berman join us recently at the annual American Political Science Association meeting in Washington. There she described the crisis of democracy across Europe in the round table's larger discussion of ‘The Strange Death – and Possible Rebirth - of the Liberal Order’. Sheri, following her recent publication of Democracy and Dictatorship: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day has a great deal to say about the rise of populism and the threats to democratic politics in Europe both in the established democracies of western Europe and new democracies in central Europe. With Sheri we were able to explore EU level politics, the fraught politics in Europe especially in the United Kingdom, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere.

Sheri is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University and she currently serves on the boards of the Journal of Democracy, Dissent and Political Science Quarterly. Come join us as we discuss the crisis of democracy in Europe.

If you enjoyed ‘Now’ Ep 13 with Susan Thorton – and I am sure you did - I expect you equally will enjoy this podcast with Michael Swaine. Michael was central to the preparation and publication of ‘China is not an Enemy’, the Open Letter in the Washington Post (WP) by Michael, Susan and their colleagues Taylor Fravel, J. Stapleton Roy and Ezra Vogel. With Michael we not only explore the reasons for this Open Letter but look at the various publications and views out of Washington that this Open Letter takes on. Michael responds to views expressed by WPs John Pomfret, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan, former officials of the Obama Administration that declared ‘engagement’ with China ‘dead’.

Michael Swaine is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a prominent American analyst in Chinese security studies. Formerly a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, Swaine is a specialist in Chinese defense and foreign policy, US-China relations, and East Asian international relations. He has authored and edited more than a dozen books and monographs and many journal articles and book chapters on US-China relations.

On July 3rd, 5 principals published a Scholars’ and Experts’ letter (Letter) in the Washington Post (WP) entitled ‘China is not an enemy’. Taylor Fravel, J. Stapleton Roy, Michael D Swaine, Ezra Vogel and Susan Thornton were the five who shepherded the letter to publication in the Opinion section of the WP. The Letter raised a fair degree of notice as it pushed back against those in the Community and in the U.S. Administration, who urged support for the Trump China policy including support for the current U.S.-China Trade War. This podcast with Susan was designed to understand how the principals came to consensus over the content of the Letter, the objectives of the Letter - its 7 propositions and what might be a better U.S. policy toward China.

Susan is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and Senior Fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center. Thornton was a career diplomat who worked at the United States State Department. She served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian Affairs from 2016 to 2018 and before that she worked as the Deputy Chief of Mission to the United States Embassy in Turkmenistan.

In leadership roles in Washington, Thornton worked on China and Korea policy, including stabilizing relations with Taiwan, the U.S.-China Cyber Agreement, the Paris Climate Accord and led a successful negotiation in Pyongyang for monitoring of the Agreed Framework on denuclearization

To round out our Summit Dialogue series on the Osaka G20, I sat down with Jia Qingguo to examine the results of the Osaka Summit as seen from the Chinese government. I also took the opportunity to review with Jia Qingguo the state of US-China relations in the context of the growing trade war set off by President Trump.

Jia Qingguo was until recently the Dean of the School of International Studies (SIS) at Peking University (Beida). Jia Qingguo received his Ph.D. from Cornell University and taught at a number of schools including in the United States. He is also a member of Standing Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a member of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the China Democratic League.

Jia Qingguo has published extensively on U.S.-China relations, relations between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, Chinese foreign policy and Chinese politics. He is considered one of the ‘leading lights’ in explaining U.S. – China relations. So, it was a most opportune moment to sit down with Jia Qingguo following the G20 Summit.

I could not forego an opportunity to sit down in the virtual studio at Global Summitry to discuss the G20 Osaka Summit with my colleague Bertrand Badre. Bertrand maintains strong transatlantic ties and so I was eager both to discuss the Summit from a European perspective and to get a closer look at European politics at the EU and at national levels.

In his career, Bertrand has held both private and public roles especially in the national and global financial system. From 2004 and 2007, Bertrand was a managing director of Lazard in Paris and responsible for the Financial Services Group and from 2007 to 2011 he served as group chief financial officer of Crédit Agricole.

On the public service side, he served in the French Ministry of Finance from 1995 to 1999 where he led a number of control audit, and consultancy missions for the French National Audit Office. In 2003, Bertrand was invited to join President Jacques Chirac's diplomatic team and was closely involved in the preparation of the G8 summit in Evian. Importantly, Bertrand was the Managing Director of the World Bank Group and the Chief Financial Officer for it.

Bertrand Badré today is the CEO and Founder of ‘Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital’ an investment fund with the objectives to finance the Sustainable Development Goals with market level financial returns.

Bertrand has written a number of books most recently, “Can Finance Save the World?” Earlier, Bertrand wrote “From Billions to Trillions: MDBs contributions to financing for development” and in 2004, he wrote “Water” with Michel Camdessus, on finance and access to water.

This podcast with Masahiro Kawai continues our country tour focused on the Osaka G20 Summit. Japan was, of course a key actor for this Summit with its hosting of this year’s annual G20 Summit. With growing competition between powers - China, Russia and the United States – the hosting has placed even greater pressure on those countries that host the annual G20. Japan also had a stressful year as a result of other events – the abdication of the Emperor and elections for the Upper Chamber. These events led Japan to initiate a truncated period before the Leaders’ Summit which took place on June 28-29th.

The Summit witnessed a ‘reality TV series’ of meetings for President Trump – with China’s Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin of Russia, the Saudi Crown Prince and topped off with a meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea at the Korean DMZ. Difficult negotiations taxed Prime Minister’s Abe and his officials in finalizing the Leaders’ Declaration.

Masahiro Kawai was an ideal guest as he was ‘well plugged in’ to the official Japanese G20 and T20 processes. Masahiro Kawai today is a Professor of the Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Tokyo and Representative Director and Director General, Economic Research Institute for Northeast Asia (ERINA). He has held many official roles including Dean and CEO of the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI)

Come listen to his valuable insights on Japan’s hosting of the G20 Osaka Summit.

We begin the country tour of the major G20 members with Ep 12. Matthew Goodman is our guest from CSIS in Washington. As his short bio below will tell you, Matt has had both public and private sector roles and has been directly involved with the G20 in past administrations.

If nothing else, as noted in Ep 11 with Yves Tiberghien, the G20 Summit was filled with pageantry – principally Donald Trump’s. There is a series of Trump events – meeting with China’s Xi Jinping over the US-China trade war, and, as it turns out, a rather vague agreement providing a truce in the tariff increases by the United States while negotiations resume, his encounters with Vladimir Putin and the breakfast with the Saudi Crown Prince and finally, but certainly not least, the meeting with Kim Jong-un at the Korean DMZ just after the completion of the Summit. One of the first questions we have for Matt is what is the Trump Administration up to; what was the President hoping to accomplish at the G20 in Japan? We were fortunate to be able to ask Matt to help us better understand the Administration’s stance with both the top-tier and mid-tier issues of this Summit.

Matthew is senior vice president, senior adviser for Asian economics, and holds the Simon Chair in Political Economy at CSIS. 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).

With this Ep 11 podcast we begin a series on the Japanese Osaka Summit. First up is Yves Tiberghien from the University of British Columbia. It is a great pleasure to welcome Yves back to the podcast studio.

If nothing else this G20 Summit was filled with pageantry – principally Donald Trump’s. There is a series of Trump events – meeting with China’s Xi Jinping over the US-China trade war, and, as it turns out, an agreement to provide a truce in the tariff increases by the United States while negotiations resume, his encounters with Vladimir Putin and the breakfast with the Saudi Crown Prince and of course the meeting with Kim Jong-un at the Korean DMZ just after the completion of the Summit.

Yves and discuss the implications of these Trump meetings, the progress on what Yves and I refer to as the top-tier issues of international trade and climate change action and then a number of mid-tier issues including: acting to limit marine plastics litter, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, digital ‘data free flows with trust’, quality infrastructure, IMF reforms with respect to concluding its quota review and governance reforms and possibly on digital taxation and base erosion and profit sharing (BEPS).” It was a busy Summit.

Yves is the Director Emeritus of the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Executive Director of the UBC China Council, and a full Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. Importantly, Yves spent several years working in Japan and has focused a good deal of his research on globalization examining China in particular. He specializes in comparative political economy and international political economy with an empirical focus on China, Japan, and Korea

Let’s join Yves in a first conversation on the Osaka G20 Summit.

It is a pleasure to welcome back Tom Wright to the ‘Now’ Series the podcast series that focuses on the contemporary issues in international affairs and global governance. Tom remains the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow there on the Project on International Order and Strategy. His research at Brookings on European politics and the impact that politics has on Europe, the European Union as well as that politics of the Trans-Atlantic community is exactly why we invited Tom to return to the Global Summitry studio.

Tom has been very active writing on contemporary politics and the impact of Trump on American foreign policy. He has recently begun a series in The Atlantic magazine on what Democratic Party foreign policy might be for the upcoming Presidential 2020 contest. Tom also recently wrote a book on U.S. foreign policy, titled, “All Measures Short of War: The Contest For the 21st Century and the Future of American Power” published by Yale University Press in May 2017.