Ep 38 - Thomas Wright on the Liberal International Order
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Description
Foreign and domestic policy in the United States seem to have melted down. The President’s major domestic policy initiative – repeal and replace Obamacare – has failed. Infighting inside the White House is especially open and vicious. Abroad, President Trump has upset almost all of America’s traditional allies, but has not reset relations with either China or Russia. He withdrew the United States from the Paris agreement and resisted appeals from 19 other G20 leaders to reconsider. He talks again and again about renegotiating trade deals that are unfair to the United States and, at times, has threatened to walk away from them entirely. Most important, President Trump is openly attacking the liberal international order that the United States has painstakingly built over the last seventy years. When other complains that he is shattering a consensus that took 70 years to build, Trump celebrates his disruptive behavior. To put this pivotal moment into context and to look ahead to the future, I welcome Thomas J. Wright, the author of the provocative new book, All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the 21 st Century and the Future of American Power. Thomas Wright is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. He has written for The Washington Quarterly, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and The Washington Post.
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