you're listening to a podcast from blogging heads tv

hi susan hey bob how you doing i'm great well that's good let me introduce this i'm

robert right this is the right show available both be a streaming streaming video and uh as an audio podcast you are susan thornton

uh until pretty recently a career diplomat now you're a senior fellow at yale law school at the

paul si china center specifically at yale law school also a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings.

I guess you had a long career in the State Department. You worked in both the Obama State

Departments and the Trump State Department, largely on China Affairs, but you're also,

you also speak Russian, your conversant in Russian issues, Russia issues.

And so that's good.

All that's going to come in handy today.

You were, for the first part of the Trump administration, you were acting assistant

secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department.

The reason that you remained an acting assistant secretary, I gather, is because people like

Marco Rubio said the Senate would confirm you over their dead body or something like that.

That's basically it.

Yeah, I was acting, went through my confirmation hearing.

The Secretary of State who nominated me was summarily dismissed. The new Secretary of State came in and had a new idea. That was Rex

Tillerson. Yeah. Okay. Okay, good. So maybe we'll have time to ask you what life was like

more generally in the Trump administration.

I'm sure it was eventful.

But why don't we just start out by sizing up the current situation?

I mean, obviously, there's a war in Ukraine.

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