Carlos Pascual and Brent Scowcroft joined Charlie Rose to discuss President Obama’s ambitious new approach to U.S. foreign policy. Pascual also commented on his recently published book, Power & Responsibility, and the realist perspective behind it.
CHARLIE ROSE: Joining me now is someone who knows a lot about American foreign policy, Brent Scowcroft, a retired Air Force general. He was national security adviser to Presidents Ford and Bush 41. Also with us, Carlos Pascual. He is director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. From 2000 to 2003, he was U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. I am pleased to have him and also Brent Scowcroft at this table to talk about something that is happening as we speak, which is an understanding of America’s goals, its power and its relationships around the world. This book is called “Power & Responsibility.” Welcome.
BRENT SCOWCROFT: Thank you.
CARLOS PASCUAL: Thank you very much.
CHARLIE ROSE: Great to see you again. Tell me how the book came about?
CARLOS PASCUAL: It came about because myself and my two co-authors, Steve Stedman and Bruce Jones, who had been working with the United Nations — I had been in the U.S. government — and we felt that we were living in this world that had radically and fundamentally changed. Where we were living in an age of globalization but we have not adapted the way that we governed this world in order to take into account the fact that the realities that we face are transnational. That no one country can fix these things by itself, that no country can isolate itself from these problems, and we had to find a new way to build the foundation for international cooperation that actually looked from a realist perspective of how we advance our own interests by reaching out to other countries as well.
Commentary
U.S. Foreign Policy and President Obama
April 23, 2009