Jeffrey Goldberg is editor in chief of The Atlantic, where he was previously a national correspondent. A former Middle East and Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, he has also written for The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post. Goldberg is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror. Named 2020 Editor of the Year by Adweek, his other honors include the National Magazine Award for Reporting, the Daniel Pearl Prize for Reporting, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Prize for best investigative reporting. Goldberg is a former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and distinguished visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Highlights
This exchange has been lightly edited for clarity
-
Jeffrey Goldberg: The primary criticisms [of the Iran nuclear deal] in, let's say more hawkish circles, are that the deal is too time constrained. It's unrelated and it does not deal with any of Iran's other malevolent actions in the Middle East. Trump says that these are the reasons that he wanted to get out of the deal. Put Trump aside for a minute. Do you think that the deal was tough enough?
-
William Burns: I think it was the best of the alternatives we could produce at that time. If we could have done a more comprehensive deal that included all of Iran’s threatening behavior in the Middle East, we would have done that. But we weren't going to get our closest European allies, as well as the Russians and Chinese, to agree to really strong international sanctions if the aims were that wide, at least right at the outset. Like any arms control process I've been involved in over the years with the Soviets and with the Russians, these aren't one-off agreements. You build on them over time. And so our expectation always was with this nuclear agreement with Iran that we were then going to have to build on it to try to extend the timelines in terms of some of the constraints on Iranian capacities to push back in other areas in the Middle East. We were just in a better position to do that. When we had united most of the international community around that set of goals, we were in a better position to deal with all of those other threatening Iranian actions.
Previously
Americans aren’t dumb—at least individually—but something changed in the last ten years that made the country-as-a-whole stupid in an unprecedented way. And yes, it was social...
News organizations find themselves in an unenviable position today: charged with delivering the facts in a post-truth world, all while staying financially viable and navigatin...
The Afternoon of Conversation is the Aspen Ideas Festival's pinnacle programming moment. Over 2,000 people gather in the Benedict Music Tent, an open-air venue with acoustics...
The US approach to China, H. R. McMaster argues, has long been based on the faulty assumption that China will “play by the rules” once integrated into the international politi...
From 9/11 to the Iraq War, from the American bond with Israel to its alliances with friendly Arab autocrats, the U.S. relationship with the Middle East is complex, to say the...
We continue to navigate the world and its challenging circumstances using a form of democracy relatively unchanged since the end of the 18th century. Well into the 21st, how c...
The media landscape has been changing dramatically and consumer habits continue to evolve. What comes next for the legacy print and broadcast media brands that have managed t...
Senator Ben Sasse, Republican from Nebraska, has been a vocal supporter of overhauling the Affordable Care Act and a variety of environmental regulations. He has made news for...
Partisanship has been a hallmark of American democracy since the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians first squared off. But many political thought leaders have begun to worry that...
The language of our time, be it in the twittersphere, spoken-word poetry, or simply our day-to-day discourse, is blemished by a set of profanities — some more vile than others...
President Trump says he does not want a major war in the Middle East. But many allies and observers worry that hardlinders in the US and Iran are on a collision course toward...
Raised by uncompromising survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover survived extreme adversity, from never being allowed to go to school, to suffering serious physi...
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a one-time presidential hopeful, shares his perspectives on his party and on the president — a figure who, he says, is both a corros...
Nearly every tension across the Middle East — from the war in Syria to Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Qatar to the United States backing out of the Iran nuclear deal — seems to hi...
Institutions and communities across America are divided over politics, culture, identity, and the overall direction of the country. Are religious congregations any different?...
Writer Wajahat Ali talks to The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg about his trip — and subsequent feature story and short documentary — to meet with Jewish settlers in the West...
The Founders created a representative republic rather than a direct democracy, designed to slow down deliberation so that majorities could rule based on reason rather than pas...
In the nearly 18 months of his presidency, Donald Trump has made an array of foreign policy changes. It began with withdrawing from the TPP, instituting the travel ban, and ca...
Aspen Institute President Dan Porterfield and Festival Director Kitty Boone kick off the 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival. This session features conversations with Jeffrey Goldberg,...
A conversation with Ava DuVernay and Ai-jen Poo (Moderator: Samhita Mukhopadhyay) A conversation with Atul Gawande and Lucy Kalanithi A conversation with Cory Booker (...
Has the great American experiment in liberty gone off the rails? Best-selling novelist, public radio host, and acclaimed cultural critic Kurt Andersen tackles that question in...
What has been predictable about the Trump Administration so far? What has been surprising? What have been the greatest successes — according to both pundits and the public — a...
What’s the state of this historically fraught relationship? Do today’s politics and rhetoric around the Middle East, immigration, and national security constitute a unifying f...
A Conversation with US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price (Interviewer: Jeffrey Goldberg) A Conversation with Larry Brilliant (Interviewer: Walter...
Is Vladimir Putin the master of his own destiny, or merely a prisoner of Russian psychodrama? Just seven years after Obama’s “Russia Reset,” Putin persists as a Western ally o...
Louis Brandeis was the greatest critic of big business and big government since Thomas Jefferson. Jeff Rosen and Jeffrey Goldberg postulate about Brandeis’s relevance for the...
What do today's Republicans believe America's role in the world should be? The GOP's presumptive nominee for president, Donald Trump, has some very different ideas than the Re...
Worry not about the demise of student activism: It is alive and well on the college campus. But worry about something else: the future of free speech. This year, the focus on...
Barack Obama came into office promising a new American foreign policy. Did he deliver? Did the president successfully extract the United States from the Middle East? Or did he...
Disaster in Syria and increasing instability in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen will continue to fuel a refugee crisis that is challenging the world, and in particular the European Uni...
The Zika virus, first identified among humans in 1952 in Uganda, began spreading across the Americas and the Caribbean in 2015. Locally-acquired cases on the continental US ar...
Homicide remains an endemic, seemingly unsolvable problem in America. And violent crime afflicts African-American communities to a much greater degree than it does others, as...
