The seventh episode of our podcast, Atlantic Talks, is now available. This week’s guest is Nuno Severiano Teixeira, former Minister of Internal Affairs and National Defense, now Professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and director of the Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI).

He was Minister of Internal Affairs on September 11, 2001. Years later, he would become minister of Defense. He was a visiting professor at two of the best universities in the world: Georgetown University in Washington; and the University of California, Berkeley.

Nuno Severiano Teixeira is now Professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and director of the Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI). He follows very carefully what is happening in international politics, and the United States in particular, with whom he believes that Europe should maintain close ties.

In this episode of the podcast, he talks about the foreign policy decisions of the current U.S. administration, the origins of this more inward-facing orientation, and the potential dangers, for the United States and the world.

“America First, often people have no idea how solid, how coherent, that principle is. They think this is something donald trump invented. Since the origin of the United States as an independent country, there are two ideas that, in the American imagination, have worked and around which there is an oscillation. There is the idea that the United States is a crusader state, which has to bring to the world its principles, its values, so it functions as the Crusaders functioned in the Middle Ages. And the other idea is the idea that America is a promised land that has to be defended because it is threatened from the outside.” – Nuno Severiano Teixeira.

On the impact on the world, and the growing tensions with the world’s second largest economy, China, Nuno Severiano Teixeira recalls that the void in geopolitics it’s something that does not exist and sees the two superpowers on a collision course.

“Geopolitics is like physics, in the sense that there is no place for vacuum. When someone retracts, another actor takes over. It is what we are seeing at the moment from an international point of view, as the rivalry between the United States and China for global leadership grows.” – Nuno Severiano Teixeira.

In his analysis of the various domains of this latent conflict, the Professor of The New University makes a worrying historical parallelism and foresees, even with the change of administration, a continuation of the tense relationship.

“If you look at what is happening today in the rivalry between China and the United States, we will see the rivalry that led to The First World War between imperial England and imperial Germany reproduce.” – Nuno Severiano Teixeira.

To listen to this episode just select one of the following links or wherever you listen to your podcasts.