Shaking the Global Order, Ep. 21: Bruce Jentleson on Trump vs. the Liberal Order

The strains on the Liberal International Order continue apace. The antagonism between President Trump and allied leaders were on full display at the recent G7 Charlevoix meeting. Though the leaders had reached consensus on the Communique, Trump subsequently withdrew the U.S. endorsement and tweeted that Prime Minister Trudeau, the host of this year’s G7 was “Very dishonest & weak.” Now the allies are meeting at the NATO Summit on July 11-12, 2018 where President Trump is likely to press his view that the allies are failing to live up to the spending commitments. Meanwhile, President Trump continues his summit dialogues with rivals. First there was the recent ‘sunny’ Singapore Summit with Chairman Kim Jung Un of the DPRK. And, President Trump is scheduled to meet with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on July 16th. With all these summits as background, I sat down with Bruce Jentleson to explore Trump’s foreign policy and its consequences for the Liberal Order. Bruce is a very well-known Professor of Public Policy at Duke University where he served as Director of the now Sanford School at Duke (2000-2005). He also served as the Henry Kissinger Chair on Foreign Policy and International Relations (2015-2016) at the Library of Congress. And he has advised officials in Washington including senior foreign policy advisor to Vice President Al Gore. I was particularly interested in sitting down with Bruce for this podcast to review with him a recent article he had written for the journal Democracy called ‘The Liberal Order is Not Coming Back: What Next?’ and for the conclusions he had reached in his examination of key international relations’ actors in his recently released book The Peace Makers: Leadership Lessons from 20th Century Statesmen’.