The Case for American Diplomacy

The Brian Lehrer Show | Mar 11, 2019

William Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, longtime diplomat and State Department official and the author of The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal (Random House, 2019), talks about his life as an American diplomat and why diplomacy matters.

"As you look at Donald Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, there’s clear a well developed case of autocrat envy there… you saw that on full display at the summit in Helsinki," says President Burns of @CarnegieEndow.
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) March 11, 2019

"Putin is a very combustible combination of grievance and insecurity and ambition… his perception at the time, not founded at all, was that the United States was out to undermine him and his regime," says William Burns, pres of @CarnegieEndow, of meeting Putin in 2005.
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) March 11, 2019

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