History is replete with leaders drawing real or metaphorical lines in the sand, challenging opponents to cross only if they dare. David Andelman, an American journalist and author, believes that one way to understand global risks and challenges is to explore the nexus of red lines that define global politics.

David A. Andelman, a columnist for CNN, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award, and executive director of The Red Lines Project, is the author of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen” and host of its Evergreen podcast. His previous works include A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today. He formerly was a correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia and editor and publisher of World Policy Journal. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and past president of the Overseas Press Club of America and the Silurians Press Club. Follow him on Twitter @DavidAndelman.

“We all know what the major hotspots are, it’s China in the South China Sea, and Korea and North Korea and the atomic bomb, it’s Iran and their quest for a nuclear weapon, it’s various issues in Mesopotamia, Iraq, and Syria, all across Africa, there are a host of red lines that mostly delineate where terrorists have begun to pop up, some of them refugees from the Middle East and so on, of course, then there are the red lines between East and West, Russia and Western Europe and America, and there are red lines within Europe as well.” —David A. Andelman

History is replete with leaders drawing real or metaphorical lines in the sand, challenging opponents to cross only if they dare. David Andelman, an American journalist and author, believes that one way to understand global risks and challenges is to explore the nexus of red lines that define global politics.  Indeed, Andelman—in this episode of New Thinking for a New World and in his recent book A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen—argues that never before have global affairs been so entangled by red lines. Moreover, he says that Donald Trump made everything worse.

Can we recover without a catastrophe?

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