Pod Save the World - Ambassador Susan Rice

Episode Date: July 5, 2017

Tommy talks with former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice about her transition to civilian life, Syria, ISIS, Russia and Trump's approach to Africa. 

My guest today on Pod State of the World is Ambassador Susan Rice. Susan served as President Obama's National Security Advisor from 2013 to 2017. Before that, she served as a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She's an Africa expert and served on the National Security Council and as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during the Clinton administration. Susan, thank you so much for being on Pod State of the World. You're the highest ranking official. You and Dennis McDonough are the highest ranking officials to be on the show,

which either speaks well of me or poorly if you. It's great to be with me, Tommy. Thank you very much. Okay. I'm going to start by getting a little personal. I'm going to do a little Barbara Walters on you. Uh-oh. When I left the White House, it was tough adjusting to normal life.

You know, Chuck Todd wasn't calling every day. I miss you, Chuck. I didn't have to go to meetings in the sit-room. No more deputies committees. That was kind of sweet, actually. The sit-room stopped sending me updates. I didn't have intelligence every morning in my little sit-room cubby. I can't even imagine what it was like.

It was infinitely more jarring for you who got the people. D.B every morning and brief the president every day and the weight of the world's problems on your shoulders. How's going? How's that adjustment? It's actually great. Look, you know, I know people are surprised to hear this, but it really wasn't that difficult a switch for me. I think that's largely because I did it once before. Right. When the Clinton administration ended, I'd been in it for eight years. I ended as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, which was obviously not as intense as being national security advisor, but it was a pretty, a serious job. And I had the experience of going from 60 to zero in that context. And that was jarring. I mean, little things. Like, I didn't even have my own cell phone. I had to get an email account. I hadn't done that. I mean, it was, mind you, this is, you know, 2001 January. But for me, that was a whole different adjustment, you know, getting going to find a trainer, going to the gym,

all this stuff that I hadn't done, and including getting ready to have what I hoped would be my second child. And in fact, I lucked out and did have a second child. This time, I knew that sensation of going from 60 to zero. And I was not afraid of it. I was looking forward to it. You know, I love my jobs, I should say, working for President Obama. I loved being ambassador to the UN. I loved being national security advisor.

it was a huge honor and privilege and I wouldn't trade it. On the other hand, I like being a normal human being too. I like being a mom. I like being a wife and a sister and a daughter. And, you know, catching up with my dear friends that have been tolerating me very scarcely for the last eight years. I had that feeling. So this time, you know, the adjustment was far less intense. You know, the basic tools of life I had.

I continued to work out during the administration so I wasn't like that. going from being a total slug to trying to get up off the couch. And it just felt fine. And the other thing that my husband and I did that I think really made a difference was the last day, the 20th of January, was a Friday. On Monday, we were on a plane to the Maldives. And just he and I, no kids. And we spent two and a half weeks there and just we couldn't entirely unplug.

I mean, that's so hard. You know, with the Internet, it was there. and there was enough craziness going on, like, with the Trump travel ban and his early days in office that I felt like it would be irresponsible of me to try to completely tune it out. But we dialed it way, way back, and it was really nice. Did you do what I did, which was trade an addiction to, like, incoming news clips and, like, sitroom updates for Twitter? Because I've seen you've been very active and very, you have a great personality on Twitter. I'm ashamed to admit that I would probably be accused of that by my husband and my kids. Okay.

It's not an addiction. I'm not on it all day long, but I do check it several times a day. And I do find in a way that I never engaged with Twitter in terms of receiving information when I was a government official. I mean, I would transmit information via Twitter with the help of my team. I didn't use it as a source. Right. And now I use it as a source along with others. Everyone follow Susan Rice on Twitter.

What's your name? At Ambassador Rice. I had Ambassador Rice. Okay. Please follow me. Please follow her. Nice people, not the haters. I mean, like, it's like six to one on there.

So one of these intractable problems you dealt with was Syria. It feels to me like an observer that tensions are constantly escalating and it's almost off the front pages. You had President Trump launched Tomahawk missiles in response to Assad's use of chemical weapons. A USFAA 18 Hornet shot down a Syrian plane recently. We shot down Iranian drones. The Russian suspended the use of a military hotline that we use to avoid collisions in Syrian airspace. I'm curious what you think of President Trump's approach to Syria and if you're concerned about the potential for escalation. I'm a little bit concerned.

I'm not overly concerned yet. But let me explain what I think has happened. Under the Obama administration, particularly in the last couple of years, we were focused predominantly. on trying to defeat ISIL or ISIS in both Syria and Iraq. And all of our military efforts, or almost all of our military efforts, were geared towards that end. We did continue to provide forms of support to the moderate opposition in Syria, but as time went on, that became less of a focus given their fragmentation and given the rise of ISIL. So we were focused on supporting Syrian forces, just to stay on Syria rather than Iraq for a moment, that could take back territory occupied by ISIL.

And we made considerable progress towards that end by the end of the Obama administration. And where we were was we'd taken back much of the northern part of Syria in partnership with what we call the Syrian democratic forces, a mixture of Arab and Kurdish forces. And those forces were close to encircling Raqa, which is the so-called capital of the caliphate. Of the so-called Caliphate. So what's happened subsequently is that the noose around Raqa has tightened. And now just in the last few weeks, the push to Raqa has started, unfortunately delayed by almost six months. from where it could have begun under the Trump administration.

In any event, as the battle for Raqa has heated up and as the Syrian regime has had to face the question really of what happens when ISIL is defeated, I think what we are seeing now is jockeying among the various forces and their proxies inside of Syria for control of ISIL-held territory. And what's the most destabilizing factor is that the Syrian government, backed by their Iranian and Russian sponsors, are trying to really push out forces that we have supported and that the counter-isol coalition, NATO and others have supported, so that they have the upper hand in this territory. And one of the, I think, issues that remains on the table, and I haven't seen much indication yet that the Trump administration has thought this through. through thoroughly is, you know, who's going to control Raqa when Raqa is liberated? Who's going to control other parts of ISIL-held territory in eastern Syria?

And it's a fundamental question. I mean, it is Syrian sovereign territory. We have a regime in Damascus who's completely immoral and illegitimate. On the other hand, nobody that I'm aware of in the United States government is interested in the fragmentation of Syria. So these are real questions that have not, at least to the public eye, have been adequately addressed. And we're seeing the Iranians and to some extent the Russians and certainly the Syrians throwing a lot of elbows. And we're now throwing elbows back. So as we should.

But I think we need to do it with care. And I'm concerned because there are clearly violently anti-Iranian hawks inside the Trump administration, including in the White House and the NSC, where I used to be that are seemingly spoiling for a fight with Iran, whether it's on the ground in Syria or Iraq, whether it's, you know, in the middle of the Gulf, it's not clear. But I worry that some of those folks will be prioritizing their parochial interests in starting something with Iran over our national interest in defeating ISIL and having a degree of stability and a political resolution in Syria and a multi-sectarian stable government in Iraq. Can I just ask you about that?

Why do you think that is that there's this faction in foreign policy thinking that seems to view every problem, whether it's Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, through the prism of Iran? I realize they're a threat. No, I don't think anyone is saying that they're good guys. But there's... It's a great question, Tommy. I mean, there's history, obviously, right? But the perception and the reality that Iran has been a sponsor of terrorism, that Iran has acted in ways to destabilize states in the region, including in particular Yemen and, of course, Syria. That's all real.

And nobody should have any illusions that Iranian interests and American interests necessarily will coincide for the most part any time soon. On the other hand, where this issue that you just described manifested itself most dramatically was in the reaction to the Iran nuclear deal. It is a good thing that we have through diplomacy and sanctions prevented Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But for many of the Iran hawks, in some ways they revealed their true stripes by opposing the Iran deal, which they had always said that nuclear Iran is the greatest threat, and showed their hand. to basically indicate that, no, their interest wasn't in preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Their interest was in keeping a boot on the neck of Iran and trying to starve and bankrupt it and isolated into oblivion, which is never going to happen. So here we have an Iran that now does not have the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon without being caught and punished

and has given up the means. And yet the hawks are even... more active than they were prior to the Iran deal. And I think part of that is a function of the pressure and the ideology exerted on our policy as well as on regional policy by the Sunni Gulf Arab states. Part of that is Israel. And the danger is not that we remain focused on sustaining pressure on Iran as we should for its actions with respect to terrorism and destabilizing the region. It's hateful rhetoric about Israel. But what we can't allow is the interests of our Sunni Gulf Arab friends to lead us in directions

that are antithetical to our interests. At this point, I don't see a reason for the United States to be on the path to conflict with Iran. I'm not saying we are necessarily, but it would seem to be in our interest to avoid that. Yes, we have to resolve the conflict in Yemen. We need to push back where Iran is overstepping. Yes, we have an interest in maintaining strong relationships with our Sunni Gulf Arab friends. And yet our interests and their interests, the Sunnis don't entirely align. And we need to know the difference between what's in our interests and what's in their interests.

Right, right. So you mentioned the military fight against ISIS. I mean, they've been able to inspire or direct attacks mostly in Europe lately. well, you know, outside of the Middle East in Europe. But as you noted, they're also rapidly losing territory in Iraq. Baghdadi once declared the caliphate from the El Nouri Mosque in Mosul. And then recently those cowards blew up a historic mosque. Unbelievable.

I mean, a stunning. I guess it's not unbelievable. Yeah, they're the worst people in the world. It's just disgusting. It's disgusting. Yeah, they blew it up rather than let it be retaken by Iraqi security voices because of the symbolism. They now seemingly only hold a few blocks in Mosul. So there's this great progress.

on the military front. But what do you think we need to do to solve some of the underlying diplomatic and sectarian problems that allowed ISIS to grow infestor? I mean, and how do we win the PR war against these creeps that allows them to inspire people in Belgium and France and London and all these places? So they're kind of two different questions. Both of them really good questions. Yeah, I love to ask like six hard questions in a row.

It's like kind of my thing. I think first in Iraq, we should expect, you know, that this fight, even for the last few square blocks of Mosul will continue to be very intense and very costly. And you have to give credit to the Iraqi security forces who have just churned for months in what is just a slog and have paid a very high price, not only for the liberation of Mosul, but for rolling back ISIS generally. And tragically, the civilians of Iraq have paid an extraordinary price. What needs to come next in Iraq is a strengthened political dispensation. Here, too, there's behind the scenes struggle between Iran and the West for influence over the Abadi government, which is fragile and still subject to a lot of the sectarian pressures that enabled, in some respects the rise of ISIL.

You know, the Iraqi security forces disintegrated under Maliki after we ended combat operations there. Despite years of American investment, they just allowed it to become corrupted and hollowed out, equipment to be stolen, and a sectarian conflict to manifest itself in the security forces. That cannot be allowed to happen again. We need a much better effort at maintaining. the improvements that we have helped to generate in the Iraqi security forces. It can't be corrupted. It can't be sectarian. Iraq's economy is very fragile, believe it or not, despite the fact that they have oil.

They have enormous debt and this conflict has cost them economically as well as in lives and blood. So Iraq needs our economic support and not just from the United States but from the international financial institutions and the international community. And it needs good political leadership. And I think Abadi's leadership has been far superior to that which we've seen in the recent past. And he's tried to do a good job of balancing these various competing factions.

But he's got to be strengthened. And the Iraqi political forces need to stand with him rather than continue their infighting. Because, again, that is in large measure, what made it easy for ISIL to take. gain ground. And the Sunnis in Iraq, the Sunni population, which has been marginalized and disenfranchised to a large extent, has to have the resources that they need to rebuild and reconstruct. They have to be welcomed into and given the wherewithal to play a part in securing particularly predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq. And they have to feel that the sacrifices they've made to counter ISIL are worth it and were the right choice. Otherwise, we'll

C3.0 from ISIL. Al-Qaeda became ISIL and we ought to be ready in Iraq and frankly globally for the next manifestation. So just to be clear, you know, success in Iraq on the ground militarily and in Syria is necessary, but it is far from sufficient to ensure the defeat of ISIL. And we need to be vigilant, you know, from West Africa where Boko Haram is in Nigeria and neighboring states, very active still in alignment with ISIL to frankly the Southern Philippines, that whole stretch of, that vast stretch of territory are areas where we need to be vigilant about ISIL gaining strength and be prepared in partnership with local forces and local governments to deny them the ability to establish a foothold.

You're listening to POTSave the World. Stick around. There's more great show. coming your way. I'm going to turn it quickly to Russia. A lot has been written about the response to Russia, and I'm less interested in like the Monday morning quarterbacking than what might happen next and their ability to try this sort of stuff again, because obviously this is their playbook in Eastern Europe. They've been doing this in Ukraine, Estonia, all these places, Lithuania. President Obama responded to Russian interference in our election by expelling 35 diplomats,

seizing two Russian compounds that have long been used to spy on Americans. targeted sanctions against Russian entities and reportedly some sketchy cyber shit that I won't ask you about because you're not going to talk about it anyway. So do you think that's a high enough cost to deter them from doing this again? Because I think a lot of people probably look at what happened and think Putin's probably pretty pleased with himself for the amount of discord he was able to sow in our politics. Well, first of all, I think our priority has to be to mend ourselves as a domestic political entity. so that we are unified and resilient against a Russian threat or any foreign threat. And we are doing the opposite. We are dividing ourselves.

And it's dangerous and it's shameful. And it is giving Putin an even greater ability to manipulate the next time, which I agree with the intelligence leadership is likely to happen. Or at least to be attempted. So, you know, I think back in December some very important. punitive steps were taken at the end of the Obama administration. What should happen now is that those punitive measures should be strengthened and reinforced. Congress has taken a step in the Senate to impose additional sanctions and to make it very difficult, absent real tangible progress in resolving the conflict in Ukraine and absent indications that Russian behavior has changed for any

administration to undo those sanctions unilaterally. I understand having served in the executive branch for many years why any White House, any administration would resist and dislike legislative mandates that limit their ability to conduct foreign policy. But Congress has done this before, and they in this instance, I believe, should do it again. So I'd like to see the House hurry up and pass companion legislation, and the president ought to sign it. And that is a modest first step in showing that on a bipartisan basis, we're prepared to stand up and speak with one voice about the Russian threat. I think we ought to be looking at other steps.

And then the new administration should continue and intensify the pressure on Russia to both acknowledge what it did and to apply the pressure such that they think it doesn't merit the cost. to try to do it again. So this is something that needs to, that the Obama administration rightly implemented on the way, towards the end of the administration on the way out, and it's something that the new administration ought to sustain. But unless and until we can agree on a bipartisan basis, in the first instance about the facts, Russia interfered with our election in order to advantage a Trump election. Russia has subsequently and previously interfered in Eastern Europe and Western Europe.

Russia doesn't have partisan affiliations here in the United States. If they did it in one instance, they can do it in another. If they advantage one candidate or party, they can advantage another the next time. We need to acknowledge the facts. We need to understand how they succeeded and shore up our ability to prevent them from doing it again. When I say succeeded, I don't mean in necessarily in affecting the outcome, but in meddling. Right, absolutely. So I think this is vitally important, and I'm deeply troubled, that we are debating amongst ourselves on a partisan basis about the basic facts of what happened, the severity of it, and we are demonstrating weak will, in my opinion, to put in place the sort of remedies that are necessary to protect us going forward.

Yeah, I'm with you. That's what worries me most, because this would actually. be easier if they hacked a machine and flipped votes from D to R. But they didn't do that. They ran an info op campaign. They ran a propaganda campaign. They hacked our public opinion. I guess can we ever be prepared for this kind of problem if we have a country that would rather believe the Russian government than the political party they don't like? Or when you have a president who won't accept his intelligence community's assessment. Like I don't want to make this about Trump, but it's like, is this a political problem? not a national security problem.

It's both. It's both. So a way scarier problem. I went to a lot of sit room meetings. You went to many more. Nearly all of them are about problems. Many of them were about really scary problems. We had terrorism, nuclear weapons, cyber attacks.

The times I saw the most unflappable people in government flapped was when talking about these pandemic diseases. Avian flu, H1N1. I wasn't there for Ebola, thank God, but you were. can you talk about how you managed that process and what that was like? The Ebola reaction? Yeah, or just like how you mount an all of government international response out of the White House to an issue like Ebola that is so terrifying to people that they don't even know how to think about. Well, let me back up and talk a little bit about pandemics generally and then come to Ebola particularly.

I think you're right. I think there is something rightly terrifying, not just to policymakers, but even more so to the public, about disease that is readily transmissible and out of control. And there's good reason for that. I mean, we look back in the great pandemic flu of the beginning of the 20th century in 1918 and again, 1957. you know, Spanish flu killed, you know, extraordinary numbers of people. And the conditions that enabled that transmission globally are far more present today than they were in 1918. 1918, you didn't have global air travel. You didn't have the degree of connectivity economically and logistically that we have at the beginning of the 21st century.

And so we need to recognize, and we have recognized, that one of the greatest threats to our security, if you define security as I do, is things that can define it in part, at least, as things that can kill large numbers of Americans, pandemic flu is, or pandemics in general, are right up at the top of the list. And the Obama administration recognized that, and we took it very, very seriously from the outset. You will recall, because of your time early in the White House, said in 2009, not long after the start of the administration, we were facing what was then, and we were told not to call it this a swine flu pandemic, that hit Mexico badly, hit parts of Europe and also the United States. And I remember sitting in cabinet meetings back then, worrying about what do we do with the schools? What do we do with international visitors? I was the ambassador to the UN and, you know, in New York, you have travelers coming and going from around the world every day of the week. You know, do you shake hands? You know, it was literally, those were the kinds of questions that were being asked at the time. And thankfully, for a variety of reasons, including an effective U.S. government response and an effective global response,

that never reached the extremes that it may have. but every expert says that it is inevitable that there will be another highly transmissible, probably flu-type pandemic, whether it's bird or swine or, you know, something else. Who knows? And in the meantime, of course, we've seen SARS, we've seen MERS, we've seen Zika, and of course, Ebola, which you mentioned. These are all different kinds of diseases, differently transmitted, more or less deadly, but they are all indicative of a problem. which is that a deadly pathogen can emerge in any part of the world, most likely to emerge in a remote rural part of the world in a poor country that has a weak health system, and find its way to an urban area and from an urban area in a poor remote country to the rest of the world. That's a pattern that we've seen before and we should expect again.

And so in the Obama administration, long before, in fact, the Ebola epidemic arose, we conceived and began to implement something called the global health security agenda, which was about working with other developed countries around the world to partner with least developed countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, where the health infrastructure was weakest, to build the capacity of these lower income. countries to detect and contain and prevent disease from spreading. And we've invested now over several years in building that global health infrastructure in the most vulnerable parts of the world. That investment needs to continue and intensify. There's a multi-year challenge and will never secure everybody from anything, but we can improve our ability to detect and contain. So Ebola.

Ebola is particularly scary. And I have to say, because I work for many years on Africa prior to the Obama administration under the Clinton administration, I had seen Ebola before. Ebola has broken out in Congo and Uganda and various other places. And because it causes you to bleed and basically disintegrate from inside and it's transmissible not just through blood and, you know, semen and all of it. that, but just through sweat, it is particularly pernicious. And thankfully, it's not transmissible through, you know, coughing, which is the worst kind of way. But when we saw this Ebola epidemic break out in West Africa and spread quickly from Guinea to Sierra Leone to Liberia and even to Nigeria, which was particularly frightening, thankfully got stamped out early in Nigeria. We knew we had a potential global problem.

And we surged on that problem under President Obama's direction. And we basically threw out the old playbooks, you know, which were sent some public health doctors, have USAID and they're very capable dart teams, disaster response teams on the ground. I remember them from Haiti. Those people are amazing. They're phenomenal. And they were out there on the ground early along with our public health system trying to help contain it. But that wasn't enough. And so we needed to do two things that were critical to helping, as we did ultimately contain the epidemic.

One was we decided to deploy the U.S. military. That was the president's decision, obviously. And we put up to 3,000 service members in the region to provide logistical support for the health workers and also to provide to build very quickly these emergency health centers. in various parts of these countries. We focused particularly on Liberia, but we helped others like the French and the Brits do the same in Sierra Leone and Guinea. So we built these facilities.

We treated health care workers. We put in a first-rate world-class logistical system to bring in supplies and workers. And the second part of what we did was we mobilized the international community. The president went to the UN General Assembly in September of 2014 and issued a clarion call to the world. to join. Africa contributed 10,000 health workers that surged into those three countries and made a huge difference. Our European partners in the G7 and the EU and other parts of the world came to

contribute. And so the president, as he had to do with Ukraine or as he had to do to fight ISIL or any number of other issues, had to build a global coalition out of scratch to surge on the Ebola epidemic. And we did, and it thankfully meant that the worst-case scenario predictions that we were so terrified about, which were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, becoming infected, we managed to contain it at far, far, far-far, far-reduced numbers. So I view everything through the prism of having worked in communications and press, and in watching this unfold, the sort of hysterical news reports that made people more scared, the irresponsible comments from politicians about shutting down airports that would have not only not helped the problem, but exacerbated it.

Is there something the government can do to help make us more resilient and prepared for these situations to react rationally? Or is that, again, like a cultural challenge? Well, I mean, there are things we can do as we discussed to try to detect and contain disease before it spreads. We did learn some very important lessons domestically about how to deal with a situation like this. the Department of Health and Human Services surged, along with actually the U.S. military, to build capacity domestically to treat potential Ebola cases and to do it in isolation from the rest of the population. And to do it effectively because with Ebola, it's so transmissible that it requires all these very complicated protocols. We also – we came very close, Tommy.

I think it ought to be acknowledged to succumbing to the political and public pressure to shut down the borders and restrict travel. President Obama very wisely made the rational decision, as you just said, to avoid doing that. Why it wouldn't have worked, as you said, it would have made the problem worse. But also it would have been a very short-term approach to what is a systemic problem. PR fix. So government can play an important role and it has to, but it has to do so from a fact-based rational starting point. And that means you need sometimes a president who's willing to stand up to a hysterical

Congress or a hysterical press or hysterical public and say, hold up everybody. Yes, this is a problem. I get that everybody is scared, but we can't be crazy. And here is what we should do and must do. and here's what we're not going to do because it won't work. And when the president, you know, hugged and greeted an Ebola survivor in the Oval Office, when he went ahead with the African Leaders Summit that was scheduled for that summer, he basically showed the world in the country that we're going to continue to do what we've got to do,

and we are not going to become victims of irrational fear. I left at the right time. You guys dealt with some shit. in 2013, man, that was... 2013, 14, we're crazy.

I remember emailing poor Caitlin Hayden who took my job when I left. She's like, I'm so sorry. You're geeking out with me on POTSave the

world. More on the way. My last question for you is, again, about Africa. I was reading New York Times article recently by a great

reporter, we both know named Helene Cooper. And the headline was the White House pushes military might over humanitarian aid in Africa. And I got to

align the eighth graph of the story that stopped me dead in my tracks. And it said, The Trump administration has proposed slashing programs to buy anti-retroviral drugs for people who are infected with HIV by at least $1.1 billion, maybe a fifth of their current funding. Research say the cuts could lead to the deaths of at least one million people in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. One million people. How is that not the most massive policy decision this government would make? You're an Africa expert. You've been working on these issues for decades. You probably feel 10 times the rage I feel about. that line being in the eighth graph. How do we get people to focus on these issues more and a separate question?

But like the Trump administration seems to be moving to a military-only relationship with the entire continent of Africa. What do you think about that? What are the problems there? This is all a major problem. I'm glad you're raising it. Look, first of all, it's hard enough in normal times for Africa. to garner the attention publicly and legislatively and from the executive branch that it needs and deserves and that our interests dictate. We are not in normal times for all the reasons that your listeners know well.

And so it's even harder for issues related to Africa to breakthrough. I'm glad Helene wrote that story. I wish, you know, the excerpt you referred to were higher up in the story. And I wish it got. I wish it got more play. But we have a larger problem here. And Africa is emblematic. Our relationship to Africa is emblematic of that larger problem, but it is not the sum total of it.

And the larger problem is that the Trump administration's budget for the State Department and for USAID, which funds the AIDS programs, it funds our development programs, it funds our democracy programs, it funds security assistance, you name it. They want to cut that by 30%. It's crazy. And when you cut that by 30%, you deprive our embassies of critical security protections that they need. And we do that despite what we've learned from various attacks on our diplomatic personnel and our facilities from East Africa to Benghazi. That's stupid. We are cutting, therefore, critical things like the president's AIDS initiative, which President George W. Bush initiated. much to his credit and that President Obama expanded and intensified.

We didn't do that purely for humanitarian reasons, as compelling as the humanitarian imperative is. That also was a security imperative. To have up to a million people at risk of death being denied antiretrovirals that we have committed to provide and sustain is outrageous. But so is it outrageous to cut all of these other health and aggrave. agriculture and development programs that are so critical to our security. You know, up until the Trump administration, to a greater or lesser extent, every prior recent administration has understood that our security depends on a balance between the security military side, the diplomatic and political side, and the economic and development side.

and that to sustain an effective leadership role for the United States and an effective approach to global affairs so that we protect our interests, we need to have those elements, all three of them, in balance. The Trump administration seems in its infinite wisdom to discount, if not dismiss entirely, two of those three pillars, the political diplomatic and the economic. and development in favor of purely hardware military solutions. Well, the fact of the matter is many of the things we've been discussing today, pandemic disease, some things we haven't talked about, like climate change, terrorism, which we have discussed, proliferation. These kinds of transnational security challenges, they're not amenable to military solutions, no matter how powerful our military is.

They require, in some cases, a combination of tools. And in some cases, none of these are military tools. So I think, you know, people like General Mattis or Secretary Mattis gets that. He's spoken to the need to have a balance of our resources. I'm not sure Secretary Tillerson adequately gets it because he's not, at least from the outside, seemingly fighting for the personnel and the resources that the State Department needs. And clearly, the White House doesn't seem to get it because they put forward a budget that is – dangerous as well as ignorant. And so this is the larger problem, which is that globally, and it's most, it's manifest as well in Africa as the Haleen Cooper story indicated, we have basically

disarmed ourselves of our various tools apart from the hammer. We don't have a screwdriver, we don't have pliers, we don't have anything else that we would normally have in our toolbox to serve our interests internationally if their budget were to be adopted. Now, the good news is, I think Congress as we've already seen is looking at this budget and laughing. Yeah, laughing or throwing it in the garbage can. Right. And I think what will emerge is a budget that is more in keeping with our traditional definition of our interests. But it will be cut. And there will be things that we need that they don't fund and figuring out, you know, how to manage that is going to be an extraordinary challenge.

Ambassador Rice, thank you for your time. I could do this all day long, but I will let you go now. But I really, really appreciate it. Thank you for all you did for the old boss. Thank you, Tom. It's great to be with you. Thanks for all your good work. Yeah, we're trying.

No, really. Thanks.