Episode S2 | E1

President Obama's Legacy in World Affairs: Change, For Certain, but What About Hope?

Air Date: May 14, 2017

About this episode

Is the world facing the President in 2017 on fire, as many argue, with the chance of major war greater than in decades or are present challenges exaggerated and sensationalized distractions from fundamentally positive trends in the arc of world affairs? How should history grade President Obama in his management of national security matters? What will be the understanding by both historians and in popular and world culture, of the foreign policy of Barack Obama?

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About the guests

Zack Beauchamp​

Senior Reporter, Vox

Zack Beauchamp is a senior reporter at Vox, where he covers global politics and ideology, and a host of Worldly, Vox's podcast on covering foreign policy and international relations. His work focuses on the rise of the populist right across the West, the Trump administration's foreign policy, and how fringe ideologies shape mainstream politics....

Trudy Rubin

Worldview columnist, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Trudy Rubin is the foreign affairs columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a member of The Inquirer’s editorial board. Her column runs regularly in many other newspapers around the United States. She is the author of Willful Blindness: The Bush Administration and Iraq. Ms. Rubin has special expertise on the Middle East, South Asia, Russia and...

Thomas Wright

Director & Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Project on International Order and Strategy, The Brookings Institution

Thomas Wright is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. He is also a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. Previously, he was executive director of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a...

Phyllis Bennis

Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at IPS, working as a writer, activist and analyst on Middle East and UN issues. She is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001 she helped found and remains active with the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. She works with many anti-war organizations, and...