Town Hall South welcomes former State Department policy director to Upper St. Clair

The world is a chessboard.
That’s the traditional thinking when it comes to foreign policy, but examining global relationships also should be in the context of a web, according to Anne-Marie Slaughter.
The political scientist, lawyer and author, who served as director of public planning at the State Department under Hillary Clinton, was the speaker at the Nov. 10 installment of the Town Hall South lecture series, now in its 47th year.
She invited the near-capacity audience in the Upper St. Clair High School auditorium to “take a tour of the world,” with the goal of “changing the way you read the newspaper.”
“You’ll think about what you’re reading, but you’ll be more aware of what you’re not reading,” Slaughter said before diving into descriptions of some of the international “hot spots:” Ukraine, Eastern Asia, Iran, Syria and Latin America.
The “chessboard” mentality in addressing tense circumstances in those and other parts of the world, she explained, is to think along geopolitical lines, pitting superpower vs. superpower. To illustrate, she showed a slide of John F. Kennedy meeting with his advisers during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
“The other half has gotten less attention,” she said. “It’s a world of networks. We have to think about, how do you analyze any situation in terms of the web and how do you make policy in terms of the web.”
Her reference entails not only the World Wide Web, but networks involving such aspects as trade, energy, climate changes and people, especially those who are displaced.
Slaughter gave the example of Syria, where nearly half the residents have been left homeless by a combination of war and drought, resulting in one of the biggest refugee crises since World War II.
“What will they think about a world that didn’t help them?” she said. “An entire generation of kids are going to grow up in refugee camps, absolutely ripe for recruitment by extremist organizations.”
Regarding 21st-century technology, Slaughter said that it’s time to apply 21st-century thinking to foreign policy.
“It’s important to think about the network world we’re in and certainly that our children are in,” she said, giving as an example the impetus to “strengthen positive digital flows and weaken negative digital flows.”
Slaughter is president and chief executive officer of New America, a nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy institute “dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the digital age,” according to the organization’s website. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, she has written several books, with the latest, “Unfinished Business,” released in September.
Town Hall South next will host CBS News travel editor Peter Greenberg on Dec. 1.