Hello again, I'm Norman Alney, and this is the To the Point podcast. We're talking foreign policy today with the added attraction of Nicholas Christoph, whatever you think he says 2017 was the best year ever. We'll talk to him later on. First, the U.S. has laid claim to world leadership since the end of World War II,

but now, with the administration of Donald Trump, America is abdicating from institutions and frameworks

that have formed American foreign policy for nearly three quarters of a century. That's according to

Richard Haas. He's a veteran diplomat,

now president of the Council on Foreign Relations. We still have the world's strongest economy.

We still have the world's strongest military, he says, but we simply don't think it's worth it.

We don't want to do it anymore. Abdicating from world leadership, that is strong stuff. But Richard Haas isn't

alone. We'll start our conversation with David Rothkoff. He's a senior fellow at the School of

Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, also a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment

for International Peace, and former editor of Foreign Policy Magazine.

David Rothkoff, good to have you.

Good to be here.

Why is abdicating a good word?

I think the rationale for offering up the word abdicating is that it implies that we had the power

and that we've given up the power.

And I think that's one way to look at it.

I think an equally persuasive case could be made for the word retreating, where it's not just

giving up power. It's actually pulling back from our engagements around the world. But no matter

where you are on the political spectrum, you cannot look at the

situation the United States is in right now and fail to see the giant question mark that's

hanging over us as a country. Will we be more or less powerful in the future? Will we be more or less engaged in the future?

I think it's not just the Trump presidency, but the Bush presidency, the Obama presidency,

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