Ambassador Nicholas Burns on Global Leadership and the COVID-19 Pandemic – Virtual Program

This is a virtual program, instructions on how to join this meeting will be sent the day before the event.

By their nature, transnational crises require concerted global efforts for an effective response. We have seen such responses before, including responding to 2008’s Great Recession. The COVID-19 pandemic is striking for the lack of global leadership—a role frequently taken by the United States or the G-20 countries—to pull the world together in common cause. Instead, EU governments closed their borders to each other; President Xi kept a veil of secrecy about the true nature of the crisis within China’s borders; and the U.S. president engaged in a global blame game. Is it too late to foster a cooperative and effective global response to this pandemic? And what country or countries have the standing and will to step in and forge a global path forward?

If you are an educator attending and would like to receive clock hours, please register as a K-12 Educator. Educators will earn 2 clock hours by attending the program and completing the one hour online module that accompanies the program. You will also be sent a resource guide via email.

About the Speaker
Ambassador Nicholas Burns is the Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the founder and Faculty Chair of the Future of Diplomacy Project and Faculty Chair of the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Burns is Executive Director of the Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Security Forum, Senior Counselor at the Cohen Group, and serves on the Board of Directors of Entegris, Inc. He is Chairman of the Board of Our Generation Speaks, which seeks to bring together young Palestinians and Israelis in common purpose.

Burns served in the United States government as a career Foreign Service Officer. He was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2005 to 2008; the State Department’s third-ranking official. He was U.S. Ambassador to NATO (2001-2005), Ambassador to Greece (1997-2001) and State Department Spokesman (1995-1997). He worked on the National Security Council as Senior Director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia Affairs; Special Assistant to President Clinton; and Director for Soviet Affairs for President George H.W. Bush. Burns served in the American Consulate General in Jerusalem where he coordinated U.S. economic assistance to the Palestinian people in the West Bank and before that, at the American embassies in Egypt and Mauritania. He was a member of Secretary of State John Kerry’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board from 2014-2017. He is a graduate of Boston College (B.A. 1978), Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (M.A. 1980), and earned the Certificat Pratique de Langue Francaise at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (1977).