By Carnegie Endowment
The coronavirus pandemic may well be the most significant global event since the end of the Second World War, but strikingly, it is unlikely to reshape the current global order. Emerging from the pandemic, the United States will still face a multipolar international environment driven by powers determined to protect their own interests and spheres of influence; intractable conflicts; and great power competition. Washington, regardless of the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, will be forced to reckon with the consequences of American retrenchment on the world stage.
Michèle Flournoy, Jake Sullivan, Stephen Walt, and Aaron David Miller discuss the future of U.S. foreign policy. Can America lead in this cruel and complicated world? How should it deploy its power and toward what ends? And how will the galactic challenges of domestic recovery influence America’s ability to play an influential global role.
Speakers Michèle Flournoy is co-founder and managing partner of WestExec Advisors, and former co-founder and chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), where she currently serves on the board. Michèle served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from February 2009 to February 2012.
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of numerous books and articles on international politics and U.S. foreign policy, including The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018).
Jake Sullivan is a nonresident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Geoeconomics and Strategy Program and Magro Family distinguished fellow at Dartmouth College. Sullivan served in the Obama administration as national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and director of policy planning at the U.S. Department of State, as well as deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Moderator Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on U.S. foreign policy.
The Carnegie Endowment advances international peace by leveraging its global network to shape debates and provide decisionmakers with independent insights and innovative ideas on the most consequential global threats and opportunities.
