It’s time for diplomacy
U.S. policymakers should use the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks as an opportunity to shift from a military-driven “global war on terror” to a policy built more on diplomacy, outreach, and persuasion, panelists told a Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) audience Tuesday evening. R. Nicholas Burns, who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2005 to 2008, said the United States spent the last decade fighting two land wars, at a cost of $4 trillion, with more than 130,000 dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, and nearly 8 million refugees, according to a recent study. “We’ve got to end both wars,” said Burns, professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics. “There is no conventional victory available to us in Afghanistan, and there certainly isn’t in Iraq.” “What we need is to see the return of diplomacy as the major way that we interact with the rest of the world....