My guest today Ivo Daalder served as the United States ambassador to NATO under President Obama from 2009 to 2013. He is now the president of the Chicago council on foreign relations and he is the co-author, with James Lindsey, of the new book, The Empty Throne: America's Abdication of Global Leadership.

The book offers a comprehensive accounting of the first two years of President Trump's foreign policy and in so doing, it offers an unsparing criticism of what the authors argue is a grand strategic failure of the Trump administration. Now, for those of you who have been around the foreign policy world for a while, you may recall that Ivo Daalder and James Lindsey last teamed up for the 2005 book America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. This book won all sorts of awards and rightly so--it was the first book to really offer a full picture of the immense scope of the foreign policy failures of the first term of the George W Bush administration. So, we kick off this conversation comparing that era to the one we are currently in.