“Perfect is rarely on the menu in diplomacy,” says William Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former career ambassador for the US Foreign Service. What you can do, he explains, is manage problems using the best of the available alternatives.

What good diplomats do, says George Packer, author of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, is “get into the skin of the person on the other side of the table” in order to truly understand them. This allows the US to draw in alliances and mobilize coalitions of countries, though Burns explains he’s worried that “we’re corroding that tool of diplomacy and squandering that asset.” What’s more, adds Mary Louise Kelly of NPR, sending diplomats to solve our most pressing global issues “only has a shred of a chance of success if that person is seen to be carrying the word and carrying the weight of the president.”

America is no longer an ascendant power, says George Packer. “We are now among many competitors with a declining relative power, with a jaded public, with an exhausted two decades of war that involved overreach and expense of resources and lives.” Now is exactly the time, he emphasizes, for the US to figure out how to regain influence in the world. Packer and William Burns discuss the impact the Trump administration is having on America’s foreign presence:

The biggest change to American diplomacy since 2016? In the past, Burns explains, a sense of enlightened self-interest guided our foreign policy — the sense that our self-interest as a country was best served by broadening the number of countries who shared those basic interests. “What’s happening today is turning that on its head,” he says. It’s now “a lot more about the self part than the enlightened part.” 

“You get a lot farther through the power of our example, than you do through the power of our preaching,” William Burns says. “And right now our example is pretty lousy.” So what consequences do we suffer when the world no longer looks to follow America’s example? Burns and George Packer exchange their worries:

Much of foreign policy comes down to human character, George Packer points out, and “Trump clearly has a soft spot for authoritarian-types.” The short-term worry, Packer and William Burns agree, is that the current administration is corroding US assets and alliances around the world.

What about the long-game issues diplomats should be thinking about? “Climate change is the single biggest existential threat out there for human society, so I think it was a huge mistake to bail out of the Paris Climate treaty” says Burns. Another critical issue, he adds, is the question of how to manage the oftentimes adversarial relationships with power rivals like China and Russia — and “do it in a way that identifies some areas in which you could cooperate.”

Foreign policy hasn’t been at the forefront of the buzz around 2020 democratic candidates, George Packer says, but it shouldn’t be ignored considering our current position in the geopolitical world. Packer and William Burns offer their insight into foreign policy experience among past presidents and current hopefuls: