You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today spent

three and a half decades as a top-rank diplomat serving the interests of the world's most powerful nation.

William Burns held State Department posts under five different U.S. presidents.

His twin specialisms were the Middle East and Russia in an era which spanned the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9-11, the invasion of Iraq, the fallout from

the Arab Spring, and the rise of Vladimir Putin. He had many challenges upon which to practice

the art of diplomacy. Now he's one of Washington's foremost foreign policy prognosticators,

contemplating the future for American leadership on the

world stage, is the Trump presidency exposing uncomfortable underlying truths about the limitations

of America's global power? Well, William Burns joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Great to be with you.

You have retired. You were a top-rank diplomat, as I just said, for more than three decades.

Do you think your career encompassed the period when diplomacy came to matter much less?

Well, I think in some ways it did. You're right. I began the book with a scene that was said in the George H.W. Bush administration when I worked for Secretary of State James Baker at the Madrid-Midels Peace Conference.

And that really was, I think, the point at which American power and diplomacy was at their peak. But then, you know,

over the course of the following three decades, part of it was sort of the natural evolution of

events as other powers rose in the world. Part of it had to do with unforced errors,

particularly in Iraq in 2003 on the part of American administrations. But part of it also,

I think, reflected a drift in the priority that American administrations attached to American

diplomacy as a tool of, you know, pursuing our interests in the world. I think after the end of the

Cold War, there was a sense of complacency. You know,

we went through a period of significant budget cuts driven by Congress. Then came the huge shock

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