Last year was a particularly turbulent one geopolitically. Of course Iraq continues to be a hornet’s nest, but everywhere from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe has experienced real tumult. There was ethnic tension in Kosovo and ethnic bloodshed in Kenya. Myanmar was a mess, while Pakistan, with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, was at an even fuller boil than usual. With climbing oil prices, Russia seems cocky and self-assured and more than ready to reclaim its superpower mantle. There’s Iran to worry about and, perhaps most vexing, China. And with China, comes the question of Tibet, which we embrace so closely here at Mountainfilm.

The next president—only eight months away from sitting in the Oval Office—will be faced with an unprecedented set of difficult decisions. How will he—or she—deal with a perpetually unstable Pakistan? Will G.W.B.’s successor also be able to see Vladimir Putin’s soul? Will he be able to say to China, “No, you cannot continue to show zero regard for the environment or human rights or Tibet and, by the way, we know we owe you a lot of money, and we’re good for it.” And what in the world will the next president do about Iraq?
There’s many other issues to worry about that may be further off our radar, such as the international food crisis, AIDS, avian flu or any number of other scary situations that could arise. How about North Korea, anyone?

We’ve brought together some stellar foreign policy experts to work our way around the world to figure out how the next president is going to handle these headaches.

Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki will moderate. I had the pleasure of working with Eugene on his film, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, and was excited to see his eye-opening, thought-provoking documentary, Why We Fight, win the Grand Prize at Sundance in 2005. Eugene is also the founder and executive director of The Eisenhower Project, an academic public policy group, dedicated, in the spirit of Dwight D. Eisenhower (the unlikely hero of Why We Fight), to studying the forces that shape American foreign policy.

Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent, came to Telluride over Christmas for the first time and was taken with it. I asked if she might think about coming back for Mountainfilm, and she said if CNN wasn’t sending her to a hot spot, she certainly would. Christiane has won pretty much every major journalism award and interviewed pretty much every major world leader, including, most recently, the Dalai Lama.

It feels a little odd to write a bio for my father, so I will quote from the 2004 Mountainfilm program: “Ambassador Richard Holbrooke is a diplomat and renaissance man in the largest sense. With vast hands-on political experience in a multitude of realms and administrations, his political resume includes service to Presidents Johnson, Carter and Clinton. His efforts as chief architect and negotiator of the 1995 Dayton Peace helped end the war in Bosnia.”

Jamie Rubin was chief spokesman for the State Department during the Clinton administration, as well as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Madeline Albright. He was the director of foreign policy for the Clinton/Gore 1996 campaign. Earlier in his career, he worked for Senator Joe Biden as a senior adviser. Today, he’s an adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign, teaches at Columbia, and lives in New York with his wife, Christiane Amanpour.
-By: David Holbrooke