Advice for the next president
The divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election has debased and damaged the nation’s political system and has allies and adversaries alike seeing a weakened United States, a development that has prompted great international uncertainty that the next president will need to undo, says Chuck Hagel, former U.S. secretary of defense. “There’s not a leader that I’ve talked to or a senior representative of a government that is not necessarily in some state of panic, but [has] a lot of concern about where is all this going,” said Hagel, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who was defense secretary from 2013 to 2015, during a talk Tuesday evening at the Harvard Kennedy School with veteran ABC News reporter Ann Compton, now a resident fall fellow at the Institute of Politics. “How is the United States going to be able to lead over the next four years,” Hagel asked, “after you’ve just come through this? Will...