Nicholas Burns, who has served as U.S. Ambassador to Greece and U.S. Ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush, and who was most recently U.S. Ambassador to China during the Biden administration, is currently teaching diplomacy and international relations at Harvard Kennedy School.
Burns told the Harvard Gazette this week: “One of the key lessons I learned in a long diplomatic career is: Be nice to your allies and be faithful to them because they’re multipliers of American power and influence in the world. I certainly saw that at NATO on Sept. 11, 2001, when I was a very new ambassador.”
My interview in the Harvard Gazette: Lesson No. 1: It pays to be nice to your allies — Harvard Gazette https://t.co/k0uy12yoIw
— Nicholas Burns (@RNicholasBurns) April 7, 2025
While Burns and President Trump don’t see eye-to-eye when it comes to NATO — Burns says it is “one of the most important institutions in American history,” while the second Trump administration has floated the idea of the U.S. giving up NATO leadership — Burns said Trump “was correct to put tariffs on China” as “the Chinese have not done enough on fentanyl” and “have been so aggressive in trying to dump their EVs and solar panels and lithium batteries on the American market.”
My advice: Be Nice to Allies. We need them. https://t.co/7u4gejAxFo
— Nicholas Burns (@RNicholasBurns) April 2, 2025
Burns added: “I think it’s right to try to raise the level of concern by imposing the tariffs, but I would predict we will not see a sustained trade war between the US and China, because I think a trade deal ultimately is probably more likely to happen. We’ll see what President Trump decides to do, but frankly, I think some of his opening moves have been sensible.”
Trump, in backing off his more universal “reciprocal” tariffs against the E.U. and other U.S. allies while raising China tariffs into the stratosphere (145% for the moment), seems to be following some of what Burns recommends.
The former ambassador doesn’t just think it’s valuable to “be nice” to allies in the military sense — he also thinks declaring war, even if it’s a “trade war,” on one’s geopolitical partners creates an instability that hurts Western democratic prosperity more generally.
Note: Burns was a 2008 visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the nonpartisan pro-democracy foreign policy think tank that President Donald Trump has vowed to eliminate during his second term.