Ryan Crocker and John McLaughlin Talk to Robin Wright About Diplomacy in the Trump Era

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Barack, Washington, Wickenden, News, Obama, Politics, Wnyc, Lizza, President

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2017

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

Ryan Crocker is a longtime diplomat who has served as the ambassador to several Middle Eastern countries, and John McLaughlin was the deputy director of the C.I.A. under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. As experts in the delicate business of international coöperation, they are both dubious of Trump’s nationalist pronouncements—and of his method of making them. “The world is a complicated place,” McLaughlin tells New Yorker contributor Robin Wright, “and it doesn’t yield well to tweets.” They believe that if the U.S. cedes its role in the world order, it may lead us back to the darkest days of the twentieth century.

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Transcript

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0:44.1	Things people love.
0:49.2	I'm Dorothy Wickendon.
0:50.7	On today's Politics and More podcast, New Yorker contributor Robin Wright talks
0:56.2	to former Ambassador Ryan Crocker and former Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin. Crocker
1:02.4	and McLaughlin will talk about the challenges facing diplomats working under President Trump.
1:09.9	Now, the real-life Trump presidency is all of three weeks old, and U.S. foreign policy
1:15.9	seems to shift on an almost hourly basis from tweet to tweet from eruption to eruption.
1:22.1	One day the president is having tough conversations with longtime allies like Australia, And the next day, he's backtracking
1:29.4	on his own blustering rewrite of our official position on Israel and the settlements.
1:34.8	Robin Wright has reported on foreign affairs for decades, for the New Yorker and many other
1:39.4	publications. She recently sat down with Ryan Crocker, a longtime diplomat who served in some very troubled and unstable countries, and with John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the CIA under two presidents.
1:52.4	Welcome to the show. I'm so delighted to talk to two men whose lives have intersected with mine now since at least the 1970s.
2:00.3	Both of you have served eight presidents, one as one of America's
	...

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