Eric Edelman of the Miller Center moderated Friday’s panel discussion, “The Putin Challenge.” The panelists included Derek Chollet of the German Marshall Fund of the United States; Allen Lynch, a professor in UVA’s Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics; Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies; and Eugene Rumer, senior fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at Washington, D.C.’s National Defense University.

Hal Brands and Colin Kahl make the characteristic argument that Trump’s approach to the world — resting on economic nationalism, extreme homeland security, amoral transactionalism, and aloof militarism — may undermine American leadership in the international system over time. Elizabeth Saunders similarly describes a Potemkin-like approach to foreign policy that slowly erodes the pillars of American power.

Professor Michael Horowitz from Perry World House sits down with Professor Hal Brands and Dr. Alina Polyakova to figure out where the Global Order is going in an era of populism, nationalism, and retrenchment.

One constant of Donald Trump’s roller-coaster presidency is the tendency for his self-generated controversies tend to drown out discussion of more substantive issues. Case in point: By criticizing the widow of an American service-member slain in sub-Saharan Africa this month, Trump has initiated another spat with a Gold Star family as well as a low-grade crisis in civil-military affairs.

Even in the Donald Trump era, it's not every day you see the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee publicly accuse a president from his own party of being a mental infant and leading the country down "the path to World War III." The spat between Trump and Senator Bob Corker has thus generated headlines for the window it has opened onto an astonishing rift between the president and one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress.  

Brands and Feaver contended that different American policy choices could have thwarted the rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. They reached this conclusion after considering a range of counter-factual scenarios, including alternatives to US disengagement from Iraq in 2010–11, robust early intervention in the Syrian civil war, and action against ISIS before its assault on western Iraq. They argued, however, that the Iraq invasion did not make the rise of ISIS inevitable; quite the contrary, they showed that different, but plausible decisions by the Obama administration could have profoundly reduced the ISIS threat before it emerged.