"How America Retrenches: Foreign Policy Pullbacks in Historical Perspective" - A Lecture by Stephen Sestanovich

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Barack Obama is not the first U.S. president to deal with the problem of overcommitment abroad.  How does his record compare with earlier cases?  Can the past help us understand the foreign policy debate of 2016?  Can it tell us how, when—and whether—today’s retrenchment will end?

Stephen Sestanovich is a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama (Knopf 2014). 

From 1997 to 2001, Sestanovich was the U.S. State Department's ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union.  In previous government assignments, he was senior director for policy development at the National Security Council, a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and legislative assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He has also worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Ambassador Sestanovich received his BA summa cum laude from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard University. He has written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. He is a member of the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy.     

Event co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation