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" "On 9/11, having friends and allies made all the difference in the world. As we look at the pandemic and a possible second wave, the global economic collapse, the challenge that China and other authoritarian countries are presenting to our democracies, do we really want to face all this alone? Having retreated, are we going to return to our senses and re-establish and strengthen these alliances? That is a rhetorical question, but it’s an important one for Americans.
Robert Nicholas Burns (born January 28, 1956) is an American diplomat and academic who has served as the United States ambassador to China from 2022 to 2025. Burns has had a 25-year career in the State Department, and served as United States Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and the United States ambassador to Greece. As under secretary, he oversaw the bureaus responsible for U.S. policy in each region of the world and served in the senior career Foreign Service position at the department. He retired on April 30, 2008. He was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in summer 2008. Burns was a professor of diplomacy and international politics at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University and a member of the Board of Directors of the school's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
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My message to young people all over the world, and in the U.S., and Canada and China is engage with each other. If this is going to be the most important bilateral relationship in the world, and it is, if we are the two strongest powers, we’ve got to find a way to live together in peace. it would be insanity to think that we would allow this relationship to descend into conflict or war. We’re not going to do that. And so our people have to work together, study together, do business together. Learn Mandarin if you’re Canadian or Brit or German or American. If you’re Chinese, you study in the United States. Our door is open to Chinese students. We want Chinese students to walk through the door of our universities. I was a university professor, taught many, well over a hundred Chinese students in 12 years, and they’re great students.