Pod Save the World - Antisemitism, the NSA, Khashoggi, then Fmr Dep Secretary of State Bill Burns

Episode Date: March 6, 2019

First, Tommy and Ben Rhodes talk about the NSA shutting down its controversial metadata program, more accusations of antisemitism against Ilhan Omar, Trump's stonewalling of Congress about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and his flipflop (again) on keeping troops in Afghanistan and Syria. Then, former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns joins to discuss his new book The Back Channel. 

Welcome back to POTS day of the world. I'm Tommy Vitor. And I'm Ben Rhodes. And we are back in the studio, back in the saddle, excited to talk about some foreign policy issues. Can't wait. Cannot wait. And then a real treat for you guys. We got on the show, Bill Burns, former Deputy Secretary of State, one of the nicest, smartest, most soft-spoken human beings I've ever met. Yeah, Bill Burns is, the reason he's a good diplomat is, like, he'll have a conversation with you, and it'll kind of seduce you in the conversation. And you'll think that you're agreeing with him. And you're just moving closer and closer to his views. And by the end, you're like agreeing with him violently.

You've changed your mind and you don't even know how it happened. And he's just fixing you with this kind of gentle gaze over his well-groomed mustache. He just wins you over with core decency. But seriously, like, Bill, you know, I think he was the highest ranking foreign service officer ever the State Department at Deputy Secretary of State. That doesn't ever happen. But he had a whole bunch of other positions like ambassador to Jordan, ambassador to Russia. He's been on the show before, but I just can't tell you how impressive it is to see someone like Bill at a table with like, you know, seven four-star generals. And they're deferring to him and asking for his opinion.

And he's just, I think he probably would have been Hillary's secretary of state. That was like the broad assumption was he would have been secretary of state. And, you know, who knows if a Democrat wins, he will be on the short list of anybody to be secretary of state. Yeah, seriously. Listen up people out there. Okay. Let's get to some news items. I want to start with something that you texted me this morning that made us both very annoyed.

So the New York Times reported that the NSA has quietly shut down a program that analyzes American's domestic call logs and texts that's otherwise known as metadata. I want to be clear that we're not mad that they shut this program down. We're mad about the rest of the story. So this program started in after 9-11. It was disclosed by Edward Snowden in 2013 and was pretty scandalous, frankly. I was gone at that time. Yeah, you had to deal with this. So the program, I think as it was constituted then and did and was replaced by something far more Orwellian named the USA for the 2015.

God, why do we do that? But long story short, I mean, this news that this really sensitive, controversial NSA program was shut down was disclosed by a random hill staffer. We should start there. On the Lawfare podcast. We really need to step up our classified. We should have these people on. break some classified news like this guy did. But you and I both read this and thought, like, what the hell?

Because one of the most frustrating things about working national security and national security communications in particular is that you're constantly told that programs like this are critical to national security to busting terrorists. And that if they go away, we're all going to die. And thus, we are told to say those things. And we take them on good faith from people we believe in trust. But we don't have a great way to fully vet out these arguments. And like, I would love to know what the hell changed between them.

and now that meant we could shut this program down. Maybe it was terrorist behavior, or maybe the thing wasn't that important in the first place. Yeah. And so for people who didn't suffer through the Snowden Disclosures in the White House, the original program was the U.S. government literally vacuumed up everybody's metadata about all their phone calls. And then, you know, the idea was that we weren't listening to the phone calls. The government wasn't listening to the phone calls, but you could try to match.

You know, there's a phone number associated with a terrorist. you see who that person is in touch with. And if you want to access the actual phone calls, you know, you need a warrant. But just the fact of the government holding all this information was concerning, Obama made some changes. What he basically did is instead of the government holding this information, the phone companies would hold on to this information. And then the government could go to them and try to access it if they wanted to.

But I think what is really frustrating is, you know, the view of the NSA articulated at the time that, you know, we as the in the White House had to wrestle with is that this was essential, you know, that if we didn't have this tool, there would be terrorist attacks. And if this random hill staffer is correct, like the government isn't even using this capability anymore. And so therefore, it's likely this program could expire. And that we have to acknowledge totally contradicts what we were being told, and frankly what we ourselves, or at least me, you weren't there anymore said, which is that this was an essential tool. Now, again, we did reform it in the Obama

administration to take this metadata out of the government's hands and leave it with the phone companies. But I think it is, you know, yet another indication that one of my worries about the U.S. government in general and national security is once you acquire a capability, you don't like to give it up. So like once you're doing drone strikes, you don't want to stop the drone strikes. Once you are collecting metadata, you don't want to stop, collect the metadata. And I think this could hopefully be an example of all these post-9-11 powers that the government gave itself, if it is true that you really don't need these, that they're not essential, then you shouldn't be doing it. You know, you don't just kind of create a hedge and say, okay, we're going to collect everybody's metadata

just in case. No, you should only be doing the type of surveillance that is necessary. And by the way, I do believe that some surveillance is necessary if you want to disrupt a terrorist attack, like you need to be able to get into certain people's emails, right? But again, I think a frustrating sign that perhaps this wasn't quite as essential as we were cast to believe. So in fairness, the NSA, maybe the program's no longer useful because all the terrorists move to WhatsApp and Signal and other encrypted apps. Yeah. Look, that's a charitable explanation.

But we should say that while the NSA wasn't listening to the substance of everyone's calls, you can learn a lot about someone from their metadata. If they're having an affair, you know what's happening. You basically know where they are at certain times. Like, you can figure out a lot about someone's pattern of life. So it's intrusive. The other thing that's crazy about this story is this, again, random Hill staffer on a podcast, discloses that in part the program was shuttered because of technical irregularities that had contaminated the agency's database with message logs.

It had no authority to collect so they had to purse them. So what that also says is the fix that Obama tried to put in place did not safeguard our civil liberties in the way we thought it was. So again, it's like it's hard to trust BANSA here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think it does demonstrate, I mean, what Obama was trying to do was to say that there are certain capabilities that are necessary. There's a certain amount of surveillance that has to take place. However, if you're actually going to access the contents of an email or phone call, that should be like a search warrant. It should be like, you know, you have to go to a judge and the judge has to say that that's okay. And therefore, there's this extra barrier of the rule of law. But as you say, just the holding of math. amounts of data, you know, is, I think, something that would be concerning to people. You know, why does they need to track all these phone calls? And that there's no foolproof way. Just like you can't guarantee that you're not going to have civilian casualties in a drone strike. You can't

guarantee that the mass collection of data like this won't lead to certain, if not abuses, at least mistakes or glitches, as this hill stop for indicated. Yeah, wild story. This hill staffer should lawyer up. Because D.J.A. is going to call. So he was, he's an aide to McCarthy. And I saw that he got, that McCarthy's office got asked for comment. And like, oh, we're not commenting on this.

Oh, God. And I was like, that guy must have a pretty shitty day at work. Yeah, that's a tough day at work. Switching gears a little bit. According to a tweet storm from Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a fantastic U.S. Senator, the administration's briefing on the death of Jamal Khashoggi was a disaster. It included no one from the intelligence community.

It had no one at a senior level. from Treasury or State, the administration provided no information that wasn't in the public domain already. And they basically said to the senators that they refused to comply with the Magnitsky sanctions. This is the Trump administration just silencing the intelligence community and giving the finger to Congress once again and frankly to the law. And it's remarkable. And I guess, you know, my question for you is, what if you had any reaction to Murphy's tweets to what we think that they can actually do about this? Because often Congress gets, uh, the Heisman, and they don't have a lot of recourse.

Well, what's amazing about Murphy's Tweetstorm is the description of this briefing, right? So they're supposed to be briefed on what happened to Khashoggi, what we know about it. And they didn't even send anybody from the intelligence community. Yeah, that's right. So that's a giant fuck you to Congress. And it's basically they know that if the intelligence community went, they would tell them the truth, which is that Mohammed bin Salman is responsible for the death of this guy. We should add that we just learned this extra detail that they brought this oven.

Did you see this? Dispose of Khashoggi's body. They had like an oven that could heat at temperatures that were enough to melt metal, you know, to just eliminate any evidence and trace that this guy was killed. Again, another indication that this was premeditated. I was going to say, what a coincidence that brought their superheated ovens. Just like they brought all the, you know, the gruesome bone saws. So clearly this is a premeditated. murder of a journalist who works for an American publication in the Washington Post, who lives in the

United States in a third country, clearly our intelligence community has information that MBS is responsible for this, and they want to shut that down. They want to just pretend like it never happened. Congress is a co-equal branch of government. I mean, they are obligated under the Magnitsky law to report on these matters, right? So they're just basically, it's like Trump's national emergency. It's saying that we just don't care about the judicial branch because they could be investigating us or Congress because, well, you know, fuck Congress. And that should be very chilling to people because, you know, what we're doing here is aiding and abetting in the murder of this journalist as the U.S. government. And what can Congress do? I think Congress can and should say that if you're not going to impose any consequences inside a way, but then we will.

Yeah, we should sanction the government. We're going to consider sanctioning them, and we're going to consider suspending arms sales to them, and we certainly should be ceasing all support for the MBS-driven war in Yemen, right? So I think Congress can step up here and pass some laws and compel this administration to hold people accountable for the murder. Yeah, you're starting to see some inkling that Congress, or at least on the Senate side, is a little bit fed up with being pushed around by the Trump administration. I mean, at least like Rand Paul coming out to vote in favor of the resolution that would, prevent Trump for stealing money from DOD to pay for his bullshit wall in the southern borders. They're starting to grow a spine. At least the one's up for re-election. Yeah, they used to

pretend to be like institutionalists who cared about Congress, right? And, you know, the Democrats when we were in office, if we didn't brief them adequately on something, we'd hear a lot about it, right? And you would think that these Republicans know they're going to be there, a lot of them, after Trump leaves, right? Their senators, first and foremost, they're not just kind of cultists in the cult of Donald Trump, but they're acting more like cultists than they are like senators. And hopefully there's enough people who start to peel off that on certain issues, at least, we can see Congress assert itself. Yeah. We are once again embroiled in a big debate over what is anti-Semitic or what is not. It's because at a recent event, a freshman and congresswoman

Elon Omar said the following, quote, I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it's okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country. She was referencing Israel. So that suggestion of dual loyalty among American Jews upset a lot of people in the American Jewish community because, you know, understandably, it feels like someone is questioning your Americanness and your loyalty to your own country. And so I think people rightly, appropriately, fairly called out that language and took Umber to edit. Now, what I think Elon Omar was trying to say was that she feels like she is being forced to support pro-Israel policies. but I can understand why many listeners aren't feeling that charitable since this comes on the heels of many earlier tweets, which were called antistemitic. So then this is just so frustrating for a bunch of reasons.

Like first, like I like Yelan Omar, but it is frustrating to me that she keeps making these comments because they're offensive and they're distracting from a legitimate criticism of lobbyist influence or of some Netanyahu's policy positions. She's like hurting her own cause, I think. Two, there is rampant hypocrisy in Republican circles. They're way harder on Elon Omar, a Muslim woman than they are on Trump when he does and says things that are like they're blatantly anti-Semitic when he told a bunch of Republican American Jews that they didn't like him because he didn't want their money. I believe that was in the primary. Yeah. And he called them good negotiators. Yeah.

I mean, every Jewish stereotype, yeah. Every stereotype he can muster in his addled brain. He busts out. And these Republicans never speak out against Islamophobia. They, in fact, Trump tried to ban an entire religion for being able to visit the country. So the third thing that frustrates me is that Democrats want to seemingly keep this issue in news for as long as possible. They introduce a resolution obliquely criticizing Omar's today. So again, this is, it's a mess.

It's obscuring an important debate about U.S. Israel policy. Yeah, I mean, the bottom line here is that nobody looks good in this debate. So let's start with Ilhan Omar. The problem with the language is this is the second time. that she's used language that is like directly in the wheelhouse of, I'm not going to use a word trope here, you know, historic allegations level of Jews. So, you know, I'm not a religious Jew, but my mother's Jewish and my family was rooted in Europe. And so clearly there were family members, people I was related to killed in the Holocaust, right? And this question of dual

loyalty, you know, that was one of the things that Hitler ginned up, you know, that essentially Jews stabbed Germany in the back at the end of World War I, and it's because they, you know, weren't loyal above all the Germany. So I don't think Elon Omar was meaning to echo that, but there is a clumsiness. Yeah, that's a deep thought. People should understand that the, if you're just looking at this on Twitter, you know, there are deep nerves to the dual loyalty thing and the Jews control everything with money thing that predate American, you know, even the debate on these issues in America. I want Ilhan Omar to succeed.

I think she's talented. I think she's earnest. I do not think Ilhan Omar is an as a semi. There's nothing about anything she said that suggests that she has some visceral dislike of Jews. She's just been very careless in her language about certain stereotypes that have historical resonance. So that's, you know, something I'd like to see. And frankly, we were just talking about this time. I'd also like to see her, you know, I welcome a diversity of views on Israel.

Democratic Party. I think it's healthy to have different, you know, polls, people on different points of the spectrum. She's more critical than even I am of the Netanyahu government. Fine. Like, let's have a big tent of views on these things. But she should be making her case about policies. You know, like, I'd actually like to hear her say, like, what does she think that we should be doing to help Palestinian suffering in Gaza? Or, like, what does she think we should be doing to promote to Palestinian state. My advice to her would be to focus your energy, your comments on the policy that you'd like to see put in place. Because when you kind of get into this territory, you know, you end up in this kind of circular firing squad. Second, I don't think the Democrats are right

to have this resolution. Because it, first of all, it's not necessary. It's prolonging this conversation. And frankly, it does raise questions about, like, well, why this? I mean, people say racist stuff all the time in Congress or they use stereotypes against Latinos. I mean, we could use a lot of what aboutism here. But the reality is if you're only going to call out a black Muslim woman for making comments about Israel and you're not going to call out a lot of other behavior, then that's not a great look, you know. And so either you're going to have to do these resolutions over and over again every time somebody says something, or you're basically indicating that you're singling this one member out, which he's far from the only member of

Congress who said something offensive. I think there was a member who yelled, like, go back to Puerto Rico or something. Recently. Recently, right? And, you know, that kind of passed. Also, like, Steve, I mean, again, I don't want to do what aboutism either, but Steve King said racist, disgraceful things for decades. He was retweeting white nationalists as recently as like a week or two ago. He was stripped of his committee assignments, but I think like he is the egregious example where some sort of serious congressional action is warranted. I don't know what this resolution does that putting out a statement and saying your piece wouldn't have done. Well, and let's have like an even more uncomfortable conversation here. The anti-Semitism that is literally putting people's

lives at risk in the U.S. is not emanating from people like Elhan Omar, right? Like the fucking asshole who shot up a bunch of people in the synagogue in Pittsburgh was, motivated by opposition to Israel. No. He was motivated by vile anti-Semitism and by the President of States who is trafficked in hate and trafficked in bigotry of every kind against Jews, against Muslims, against black people. The anti-Semitism that we have to be worried about infecting our body politic is actually not like criticism of the Israeli government. It's criticism of Jews here in America, right? And so that to me is what is particularly infuriating, I guess, about like the fact that we whip ourselves into frenzy when Ilhan Omar says these things. Meanwhile, when there were reports about white supremacist terrorism, like the Republicans are trying to suppress that in our administration, right?

I mean, if you want to talk about any Semitism that is dangerous, we should be talking about the President of the United States and the words that he uses. And we should be talking about why it is that more and more white supremacists are being. radicalized, coincident to Donald Trump being president. I don't think that is a coincidence. And then lastly, the kind of spiking of the football on Il-An Omar by some of our critics. Including the president. Yeah. But in the kind of pro-Israel side of the debate, I always pause because I think you can be pro-Israel while also being critical of the Netanyahu government. I do have a problem with, I mean, long before Elon Omar, we talked on this point. podcast about how they reflexively called people anti-Semitic. I was called an anti-Semite

frequently. For supporting the Iran deal. Barack Obama was, for supporting the Iran deal, I remember Obama said the same people who led us into war in Iraq are trying to lead us into war of Iran. And they said, that's anti-Semitic because you're repeating the anti-Semitic trope that Jews are warmongers. When he never said anything about Jews, he was, frankly, John Bolton was who he had in mind, because he'd written an op-ed saying, bomb Iran and John Bolton's not Jewish show. Yeah, I mean, last time I checked, Colin Powell did a pretty solid presentation at the UN that let us endure. Yeah, exactly. And so I think there is a danger of the overuse of this, this attack mechanism.

You know, because it does make people think, you know, and you saw that in the congressman who tweeted, it's unacceptable to question the U.S. support for Israel. You know, I think that you used a very good phrase on the BDS issue, Tommy, where you said that the opponents of BDS are kind of hanging a lantern on this issue in a way that we'll actually could boomering on them, where people say, well, why can't we speak out against Israeli policies on college campuses? Or why can't we choose on our own if we want to boycott certain products that are made in Israel? And again, I think that it's not helpful to Israel if there's this kind of use of overwhelming force against its critics every time something like this happens.

Because it leads people to ask, like, why can't we question this? relationship with this government in Israel that is increasingly undemocratic and led by someone who may be criminal and it shows no empathy what's over to the Palestinians. You know, the same day that this criticism was happening, I noticed we literally ended having a consulate in Jerusalem that was our representative for many years to the Palestinian people. Because we moved to our embassy now, we're just going to have one embassy that is in Jerusalem and it's the embassy to Israel. And we have no diplomatic representation of Palestinians. That's a bigger story than what on Omar said. Like the fact that we're basically, through our policies, like not even our words

here, we're indicating that we don't even recognize the Palestinian. Who are they? If they, they don't, they don't have a state now. There are these people living in the West Bank. Their land is being taken away. The settlements are encroaching further and further into the West Bank. We retracted our diplomatic recognition of them. They're just these stateless people. What is our policy towards them? That to me is, is pretty offensive if you care about human rights as well. And so, again, I think Ilhan Omar doesn't do herself any favors because she should be making a debate about that and saying like, she should be saying like, why are we shutting down diplomatic representation to the Palestinian people instead of kind of engaging in this dual loyalty trope. You know, so nobody wins in this. Not Ilan Omar, not like her critics, not the Democrats, not the Republicans.

Like everybody looks like they're just using this for their own political purposes. And that is doing nothing to help Israel. that is doing nothing to help the Palestinians, and it's doing nothing to kind of combat the real scourge of any Semitism here, which is emanating from white supremacists, not from Muslim members of Congress. Yeah. Elon Omar has apologized in the past for other unfortunate comments, compellingly to me, authentically, honestly. She needs to fix this because she's hurting her own cause, but that said, it also doesn't justify. I mean, someone in the West Virginia State House put up a poster that had a photo of the Twin Towers getting struck on 9-11 with her face.

You know, people who make death threats against her, right? So, like, this is going, it goes in a dangerous place when everyone demagogues these issues. I get that if I, if, look, I had a Muslim assistant, a wonderful woman named Raman Ahmed who wrote a great piece of the Atlantic a couple years ago, but, um, she wore hijab and she would get harassed on the, the metro on the way home. Like, when Trump's campaign was picking up and the anti-Muslim rhetoric was picking up. She started to get, like, harassed on the metro, she felt uncomfortable walking at night. I'd have to call her when she got home and make sure she'd do like, hey, like, and that's an experience that Muslims are having around this country

right now, right? And I do understand the frustration of Muslims saying, like, well, how come nobody cares about that? You know, and how come nobody's calling that out, right? And that's, I think, a very legitimate expression. And I should say that Jews have traditionally been allies with other groups who felt marginalized. In the civil rights movement, Jews were huge supporters of Martin Luther King because they saw solidarity amongst minority groups and marginalized people. I would hope that American Jews could express solidarity with what Muslims are going through just as fiercely as they also police this kind of speech that is hurtful to Jews. Like that's been one of the great attributes in the Jewish community in this

country. And if something good can come out of this, I do hope that there can be that kind of allegiance among the Jewish community and the Muslim community here in the United States. Agreed. Okay. One more topic that is, frankly, I'm a little sick of talking about, but we must. Okay, so a few months ago, Trump said we're getting all our troops out of Afghanistan. And then I read the Times a couple days ago, and there was a report that Trump will keep around 7,500 troops in Afghanistan for three to five years as we negotiate a peace agreement with the Taliban. So that's Afghanistan. Trump said we were getting all our troops out of Syria right away. And then today he sent a letter to Congress saying he wouldn't

100% agrees with keeping a military presence in Syria. So these are separate wars and separate places. I guess we should separate them out. First of all, okay, so with Afghanistan, I feel like when we did President Obama's Afghanistan and Pakistan review back in 2009, the military told us, or told Obama, that a presence of under around 10,000 troops or so was indefensible and thus not an option because you wanted to have two platforms for force protection, right? You knew basically two runways. So if one infrastructure is overrun, you can send forces from another place to defend them. So that confused me. Second, I'm glad that they're negotiating with the Taliban and maybe a power sharing agreement is inevitable. But I guess seeing it written in that way

was stark. And I just also imagined the reaction from the Lindsay Grahams of the world, have this been an Obama deal. Yeah. I mean, the bottom line, at a certain point, you just have to accept that we're going to leave Afghanistan and that we're going to leave without everything being fix in that country and with the Taliban having influence in that country, or you're going to stay there forever, you know? And there's this desire to find some way to look like, you know, we are leveraging the ongoing troop presence with the Taliban. Look, the Taliban is going to be there 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, the people who comprise the Taliban, right? Because they live there. And either we think we should have troops in Afghanistan forever, or we think that it's time to get out.

And I think it's time to get out. There is a guy fighting Afghanistan today who was born after this war started. Like there's beyond diminishing returns here. So in my mind, it's as good. The trajectory should be to drawing down and getting out of Afghanistan. I think there's going to have to be symptomatic agreement of the Taliban. I do think we need to be focused at diplomacy on getting the Taliban to talk to the Afghan government, not just to us, because ultimately it's the Afghans who have to talk to each other and work this out.

But I think that it's time to just say, we're drawing down and we're drawing down ultimately to zero here. And, you know, we can figure out what exactly the timeline is for that. But, you know, I think if we fall into this trap of saying that this is going to be leveraged in these peace negotiations, the Taliban knows we're leaving, they know we're leaving. And I think the goal there needs to just be having deaf diplomacy between the Taliban and the Afghans. And yeah, we can always, we have an Air Force. You know, we have cruise missiles. We can, we can, if we see a terrorist training camp, or see something that is a threat to the United States,

we can still take a shot at something in Afghanistan. But I think we have to give up on this idea that the presence of U.S. troops there is going to fix the country. It's not at this point. No, it's not. So to Syria. So I guess he's planning to keep a small force in Syria for a while, too. I mean, this feels like a more defensible policy, at least in the very near term.

We don't want our Kurdish allies getting slaughtered. We don't want ISIS members who just went to ground or terrorist. that was just liberated to get retaken or for the fighters to pop back up. But I guess just the total 180, it's just, it's not defensible. It's not, it's scary. It's scary. I don't understand how, again, the Lindy Grams of the world who accused Obama of dithering and screwing up in Afghanistan for not sending, you know, 40,000 troops when we sent 233,

can find a solution like this acceptable. It's just common sense has gone out the window and, so many respects, but it's also gone with respect to foreign policy. Yeah. And again, here, too, you could have said, we're going to draw these troops down over the next year or two and use that time to be engaging a lot of diplomacy and trying to broker something for the Kurds and making clear what will lead us to use kind of air power if we see something in terms of the reemergence crisis. Instead, Trump announces that crazy, you know, we talks to the sky and he says everybody's getting out in 30 days.

And since then it's just been pure wedding, you know, left, right, and center. I think it's like 200 guys. Yeah. Like, I don't know what 200 troops can do. Yeah. Well, what this feels like to me is that Trump, first of all, I think it says something that the Republican Party has stomached everything Trump has done except like taking troops out. Ending worse. Like it's like a great window into the Republican Party that like, you know, throwing babies in detention, separating families, like all of his.

comments, like the rampant corruption, like that's fine, the criminality. But if you try to take us out of these wars, we could overrule you in Congress. And so what it feels like to me is this is a way for everybody to save face, right? So it's a way for Lindsey Graham to go beat his chest and tell people he got Trump to change his mind and keep some troops there. Trump's still drawing the troops down. There's kind of this symbolic number of troops, if it's only 200 who are there. Nobody knows what our policy is. I'm sitting here today and have no idea what our policy is. is. The people sitting in CENTCOM, I don't think, know what our policy is, right? So that's the problem. The problem here is there needs to be clarity about what we're doing. And now Trump has kind

lost the capacity to have any clarity because he's taken so many different positions on this. Yeah. It's baffling. Yeah. Truly baffling. And just I must scare the hell out of all our allies. But here we are. Here we are. Well, that's it for us for today. But after a break, we'll hear from former Deputy Secretary of State, Bill Burns. I am thrilled to welcome back to the show. Ambassador Bill Burns. He's the author of the new book, The Back Channel, which is out on March 12th. But you need to pre-order it today because it's going to be a bestseller. And everyone knows that if you pre-order a bestseller, you look cooler than all your friends who are also going to be reading it because everyone's going to read the back channel. Does that sound right?

Yeah, I think if you are looking for like the person in this country who's been at the center of our farm policy for the last three decades, who has the most lessons to impart, on the rest of us, and who I hope is not done in his career in public service, so has another act. You definitely need to check out this book. There are great stories in it. I've read it. You know, Bill served as ambassador in Russia and Jordan. He troubleshoot it in the Middle East. He was deputy secretary of state. He opened the secret channel with the Iranians in Oman that led to the Iran nuclear deal. There are great stories and great insights here about our foreign policy. So run. Don't walk to the pre-order button on your computer for this one, yes.

Bill, thank you for being here. I hope that was extended enough plug. It's great to be with both of you guys. And certainly one of the highlights of my checkered career was the chance to work with both of you and the Obama administration. So thank you so much. So there's a great course. There's a great passage in the book from when you were just a young, young, maybe even pre-foreign service officer. I think you might have been taking your foreign service exam. When you were asked, I believe, by your examiners, what's the biggest challenge in American foreign policy today? And you replied, I think it's us. After Vietnam, we have to do a better job of understanding which problems we can solve and which we can manage.

I thought that was a beautiful distillation of an important argument. When you look at the amount of money and time spent in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the middle, least peace process, for example, do you think that we are still the biggest challenge? Yeah, I think if anything, that lesson has deepened, you know, over the 35 years ago or so since I first took the Foreign Service exam. I mean, I think, you know, today, as both of you guys know, there's a pretty big disconnect between people like me, you know, card carrying members of the Washington establishment and lots of American citizens who don't, I think, need to be persuaded of the importance of disciplined American leadership in the world, but what they're not so convinced

of is the disciplined part. And, you know, that was both the result of a tragic war in Iraq in 2003, of the financial crisis in 2008. But that disconnect still looms pretty large. And so in a sense, the challenge, the problem in a way, is still us bridging that disconnect. And, you know, whomever got elected in 2016 was going to have to address it. I just think President And Trump over the last couple of years has widened that disconnect and aggravated it rather than making it better. Bill, I mentioned this on the last podcast we did, which is I was in Munich at the Munich Security Conference.

And, you know, what was interesting to me and a little, you know, troubling and it speaks exactly what you were just saying, is that you could have basically picked just about anybody out of that crowd and found support for continued troops in Afghanistan, continued troops in Syria, criticism of those. Obama for not going into Syria against Assad. And I remember making the point in one of my interviews, which reflected a lot of those views, is look, even if you think all those things are the correct policies, you have to recognize in our democracy that there's just not support for those policies anymore, that the one thing Republican voters and Democratic voters seem to agree on is that we've been

overextended in these wars. And Obama's answer to that was the opposite of Trump's. Obama's answer was more diplomacy, agreements like the Iran deal. Trump says to pull back. But I guess the question I have is how do you democratize that establishment? How do people try to formulate ideas for dealing with very big challenges that are more responsive to public opinion or to the lessons of the last 10 or 15 years since 9-11? Well, I think part of it is you've got to be honest with people. You've got to be straight with people. I think President Obama was about the areas, especially in Iraq, where we got ends and means way out of whack, you know, where we based a strategy on some pretty badly flawed assumptions

and ended up with a huge cost in American blood and treasure. So I think you've got to be able to make the case to people that we're capable of disciplined leadership. I think you've also got to be able to make a case. And here I'm being self-critical. I don't think, you know, those of us in the State Department over many years, you know, years did nearly as good a job as we should at helping Americans to understand that, you know, when we do big business deals overseas, which embassies help to facilitate, that lead directly

to creating jobs and improving, you know, the chances for prosperity for lots of Americans, we need to drive that home to people. And we haven't always done as good a job of that. So, you know, in a sense, you know, we need to make clear to people, not only does smart, effective foreign policy begin at home in a strong economic and political system, but it ends there too in better jobs, and, you know, more prosperity and a healthier environment and better security. So it's a big challenge and it's, that's not a partisan statement. I mean, I think that's a challenge for, you know, both parties and people across administrations I worked in. Yeah, I agreed. In the book, you write about a whole bunch of parts of your career, including when you're ambassador to Russia,

which meant, you know, you dealt with Putin a lot from the, time you were living in Moscow to when you're a deputy secretary of state in the second Obama administration. What is he like? What's it like to sit in the meeting with him or share a meal? And do you think he changed over the past few decades or did his political situation change, which led to different behavior? He's not a very sentimental guy. It's a starting point. And, you know, I think like anybody, you know, he's changed a little bit over the course of the last couple decades. But, you know, he's fundamentally distrustful, distrustful his own political elite, distrustful of most Russian citizens, distrustful of foreign leaders. And I remember, you know,

the first time I met him as ambassador, you know, you go through this ceremony of presenting your credentials. So you carry a letter, in this case from President George W. Bush, to present to him in the Kremlin, which, as both of you guys know, is kind of built to inspire awe in foreigners who are coming into that, these huge cavernous reception halls, long corridors. I remember walking down this very long corridor, 60-foot-high ceilings, you come up to these two-story tall bronze doors and you kind of are kept waiting there for a little while. Then the doors open and out comes Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, who, again, as both of you know, is not a very imposing figure.

He's probably about five, six or so. But, you know, this was meant to shock in awe the new American ambassador, and it had some effect as well. And I remember I stuck out my hand to shake his hand and also hand over my credentials. And before I had gotten a word out, President Putin said, you Americans need to listen more. You can't have everything your own way anymore. And this was in the summer of 2005. So, you know, that was in my experience anyway, vintage Putin. you know, unsubtle and kind of defiantly charmless, with big chip on his shoulder, determined

to demonstrate that the Russia, the 1990s, was no more. Russians were no longer the 98-pound weakling on the beach. You couldn't kick sand in their face. And he was determined to push back. And that kind of theme ran through a lot of my own dealings with him and I think a lot of U.S.-Russian relations in the last 20 years. Bill, do you think that we, the United States, pushed too far. You know, the expansion of NATO, not only in the Baltics, but the membership action plans for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, the sense of encroachment into what Putin viewed as, you know, Russia's sphere of influence, the funding of, you know, civil society organizations that that might have been present in the Medan and Ukraine. I don't want to suggest that I agree

with Putin's criticisms of us. I do think we have to, we've all heard them. I think we do have to evaluate them at face value. I mean, you were, you were there throughout this whole time. Did you ever think, boy, if we just, if we, if we cross this next line, Putin might hit back because, you know, my analysis essentially, Putin felt like we were coming into Russia, so he came into our election. Like, do you think there's any validity to that worldview? You know, I think both of us Americans and Russians at different times over the, a quarter century since the end of the Cold War have had our illusions. You know, I think Russia's had illusions about, you know, how it could restore itself quickly

as a kind of peer of the United States as an equal. Putin's had the illusion, I think, that you can, you know, make Russia competitive in the 21st century with a politically very repressive state, a one-dimensional economy. And I think strategically that's a very flawed view. but we had our own illusions about born of the 1990s when we were the singular dominant player in the world. And it seemed to us that we could maneuver over or around Russian objections on a lot of things. And I think where we made a mistake was towards the end of the George W. Bush administration, where, you know, we pushed to open the door for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.

And, you know, I think that's the, especially with regard to Ukraine, it's kind of the reddest of red lines. for the Russian political elite. This is not unique to Putin. And one of the things I think sometimes we misunderstand is the depth of concern across that political elite and across Russia about that issue. And so none of that,

none of that is a justification, a rationalization, an excuse for Putin's aggression in 2014 when, you know, he invaded eastern Ukraine, he swallowed up the Crimea. But I do think that, we were guilty of our own kind of political overreach at the end of in the spring of 2008. And I think it fed the argument that Putin made to Russians that, see, they're out to keep us down,

they're out to get us, you know, they're out to extend NATO's borders to the Russian frontier, the Russian-Ukrainian frontier. And I think, especially in hindsight, you know, that was a mistake on our part. And I tried to be honest as ambassador to make that argument, even if it wasn't a, you know, particularly popular one in the administration at that time. Current and former State Department officials seem to describe working at state in the Trump era is almost a traumatic experience. And I imagine of them, many of them who are listening wonder what it might be like on the

other side and frankly if the institution, if the building will fully recover. So I was trying to think of a different period of time for state that might have been equally as challenging. And I thought of 2003 when then Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the UN to make the case for war in Iraq. and he gave a presentation based on intelligence that was just catastrophically wrong. I know you greatly admire Secretary Powell.

You worked at the State Department before during and after that period of time. How did the agency, the State Department, bounced back from such a difficult moment? It was a rough time. And you know, and you know that period. Well, Ben, from your work on the Iraq study group with Secretary Baker and with Lee Hamilton,

it was a painful period when, you know, I've seen lots of moments of differences between agencies, you know, during different eras in Washington. But that was the most intense, the differences between Powell's State Department, Rumsfeld's Pentagon, differences with Vice President Cheney's staff in the White House. And it was another collection of illusions which led us down, you know, what truly was a tragic path in Iraq in 2003. You know, we tried to be honest about our concerns, again, being self-critical.

I certainly was not effective in winning any of those battles within the administration in that era. I remember at one point, Ryan Crocker, who was one of my colleagues in the Near East Bureau in the State Department, another guy named David Pearson, I spent a couple of hours brainstorming about everything we thought could go wrong if the United States essentially on its own invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam, because our concern was always less about the military challenge. and more about managing the day after in Iraq. And so we put together a memo. It was really more a kind of hastily collection, you know, put together collection of horribles

more than a coherent memo, but just kind of listing all the things that we could go wrong. And it was our antidote to the incredibly rosy assumptions that were coming out of some of the civilians in the Pentagon and, you know, some folks in the White House. And it was imperfect. We got a lot of things wrong. I've always thought you've got to be honest as a career official about our concerns. And my biggest professional regret to this day is that I didn't push as hard as I should have and certainly not as effectively as I should have. Well, I respect your self-criticism because you don't hear a lot of that from Don Rumsfeld.

Some of the other folks who are a little more responsible than you. Okay. So again, the book is called The Back Channel. It got that name because you are one of the greatest diplomats of a job. generation. So we're going to ask you some impossibly difficult challenges and expect you to solve them on a podcast. So if you're ready, I will fire away. Sure. Okay. So the reports that Bashar al-Assad, since he basically won the Syrian Civil War, that Arab states are looking to re-engage with him and gain back the influence that they have lost in the region to Syria, Iran, and Turkey. The U.S.

apparently is blocking the Arab state's efforts at re-engaging with Assad. So how do you think the U.S. should deal with someone like Assad going forward? I mean, do we have to engage with him, given all the security challenges that Syria represents or presents to us? Or is he just a pariah until he moves on? Yeah, I think Bashar al-Assad is going to remain a pariah for a while with, you know, with good reason given the atrocities that he and his regime have committed. You know, I understand the reality, which is that we, the United States, has very little leverage in Syria right now.

I do think it's important for us to work with, you know, the Russians to the extent we can, the Turks and others, to try to try to. to reduce the dangers of escalation. You know, Syria right now is a really crowded and combustible landscape. You can have Israelis and, you know, Iranian, you know, Quds Force soldiers bumping into each other. You can have Turks and Kurds bumping into each other. It's in all of our interest to try to reduce the dangers of that right now. It's also in our interest, although I'm quite realistic about this, to try to open the door at least a crack toward some kind of long-term political transition in Syria. The chances of that are happening anytime soon are virtually

nil. We have a little bit of leverage in the sense of the potential reconstruction assistance that Syria desperately needs that we and the Europeans and others might be able to provide. But we're not playing a very strong hand right now. And so, you know, we're going to be very limited in what we can accomplish. But I am not a big fan, you know, of, you know, the rehabilitation of Bashar al-Assad. I think his atrocity. are going to stand in the way of that for a long time. Agreed. Okay, I guess that one wasn't that hard.

So here's another one. So Pakistan and India, you're on the brink of a war. If you got called to the Oval Office right now, and President Trump told you to go mediate the conflict, what would you do? How would you go about trying to cool this thing down? Well, I mean, the classic challenge, I think, for American diplomacy especially,

would be first to, you know, inject ourselves in a situation. I mean, there are going to be limits to, you know, know, our influence in moving the Indians and Pakistanis. But, you know, what you want to focus on is managing a situation and trying to de-escalate it. So people have, you know, some off-ramps. You know, given the dangers of two nuclear-armed powers going off to the races, and, you know, you can see a really tragic conflict emerging. And, you know, it's the classic challenge for American diplomacy, whether it's a secretary of state or anybody else, to physically show up. And, you know, and make use of other senior officials, especially given the role of the Pakistani military,

historically, as all of us know, different chairman of the Joint Chiefs in Washington. I remember Mike Mullen when he was chairman had particularly strong relations with some of the senior Pakistani military leaderships to work all of those avenues. Kayani and Pasha. Not because you think you can solve the problem, but because you want to guard against the dangers of escalation. And then you want to work with other players who have influence too. The Chinese who have a long historical relationship with Pakistan are just one example. So, you know, that's really traditionally what diplomats do.

And I think this is one of those cases where it's really important for us to be as active as we possibly can. Because I think people tend to – India, Pakistan is an area of potential conflict that rarely gets the attention it deserves, not just in Washington but other capitals. Bill, I just wanted to ask a couple of Iran questions. One, you know, that you definitely talk about in your book and then one about where we stand today. But first to deal with the history, you know, you and our friend Jake Sullivan initiated really the secret channel with the Iranians in Oman that ultimately led to the interim Iran deal. and then that ultimately grew into the comprehensive JCPOA. And I was wondering, you know, if you could just take people into that experience of, you know, what's it like to basically show up in Amman, this kind of slowly mysterious Gulf country governed by this kind of enigmatic sultan.

And I remember, you know, you had the initial meetings with the Iranians before Rahani was elected. Right. And then after Rahani's election, you know, we have a slightly more, you know, open Iranian leadership in terms of engaging. the U.S. Right. But in those secret talks, but, you know, not even really getting into the issues, you know, yet, but how do you build trust with interlocutors who represent a government that chance death to America?

How do you build a personal rapport as someone opening literally a back channel? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, trust is probably an overstatement in a way in the sense that the depth of mistrust on both sides, given the fact that we had spent 35 years without sustained diplomatic contact since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and then the hostage crisis which followed it. So, you know, it was a minefield in U.S. Iranian relations, you know, throughout the course of my career, in a sense, it was a cloud that hung over the whole of my career. I remember taking the Foreign Service exam at the old U.S. embassy in London the same week

as the, as, you know, our diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran. So, sort of throughout my career it was hanging out there. But I was profoundly convinced, and more importantly, President Obama, as you guys know, was profoundly convinced that we had to test diplomacy with regard to, you know, Iran's unrestrained nuclear program to see after a decade at war, you know, since the 2003 Iraq War in the Middle East, that we could demonstrate that diplomacy could produce results too. Now, it wasn't just about talking to Iranians. It was, as you guys know, about building up leverage, political and economic and potentially

military leverage as well. So what the president did in the first term of his administration, President Obama, was to build unprecedented pressure against Iran. You know, the value of their currency had dropped by 50 percent. The value of their oil exports had dropped by 50 percent. So their minds were focused when we first engaged at the very beginning. beginning of March of 2013 in Oman. The Omanis were good, quiet facilitators, and so it was an appropriate place to begin this.

But I remember walking into that room with Jake Sullivan, who's a wonderful public servant, and, you know, a few of our colleagues, because as you guys remember, it was a tiny team and one of the best kept secrets in my experience in three and a half decades in government. And we really didn't know what to expect. And so it took, you know, several sessions. I mean, we had about nine or ten, you know, different sessions during the course of those secret talks in Oman and Geneva, you know, and elsewhere, to sort of test the proposition. And I wouldn't say we ever built trust, but I think we did build over time a fair amount of professional respect in the sense that those guys understood we were speaking for President Obama and for Secretary Kerry then. and that we could deliver on the things that we were committing to.

And they demonstrated the same thing on their side. And so that's what led, you know, ultimately working very closely with, you know, other wonderful colleagues like Wendy Sherman and others of our mutual friends in the U.S. government and our international partners. You know, we were able to produce an interim agreement towards the end of 2013, which was a pretty good deal, I think. and a very good foundation for what later became the comprehensive nuclear agreement. But it was a fascinating experience. It's the kind of thing that, you know, you prepare your whole career for. It didn't produce a perfect agreement in the end, but perfect is rarely on the menu for diplomats. It did produce ultimately in the JCPOA, the comprehensive agreement.

What I'm convinced to this day is the best of the available alternatives for preventing Iran from developing a nuclear. your weapon. Hey, Bill, just sort of pivoting off of Ben's question about Iran. I mean, in 1953, the CIA helped foment a coup in Iran. Elliot Abrams, reemergence in government is reminded of all the wonderful things the CIA did in Latin America to destabilize governments and otherwise support unsafe people over the years. Was there ever a time when you were ambassador in a country, say, where you grabbed your CIA counterpart by the scruff of the neck and said, hey, stop helping? I was pretty fortunate, to be honest with you, in the senior CIA personnel that I worked with, you know, really good professional relationships. And, you know, I had the sort of same thing during different periods when I worked in Washington.

But, you know, good ambassadors are responsible for what happens in the country. You're the president's representative on the ground. And so, well, it's important not to micromanage, you know, the other sort of agency or department chiefs who are working for you. you know, you got to trust them professionally. What you have to expect is that they're going to be transparent with you, and you're not going to be surprised by actions that they may be taken. And I was fortunate in that sense. I was not surprised, you know, during the course of my tenure as ambassador.

On Iran, Bill, you know, they obviously had divisions in their own system about even the JCPOA. They've complied with it, and now we've pulled out and they're pursuing this kind of pressure campaign with not really evident results. Do you see any pathway to the Iranians somehow staying in this deal as it currently exists with the Europeans, Russia, and China through, say, the next election? You know, absent a war, which is not impossible with the people in charge of Washington, do you think that this deal can exist on life support and a future president who's a Democrat can come back into it? You know, it's possible, Ben.

I think the temptation, the inclination, at least, of the Iranian leadership right now is to try to hang in there. And I say that, again, with, you know, fully understanding the ways in which Iranian behavior can threaten our interests, the interests of our friends in the Middle East, quite beyond the nuclear program. But I think, you know, their inclination right now is to take advantage of the fact, if they can, that, you know, in effect, after spending all those years working with you guys and serving President Obama to isolate Iran, you know, we've managed to largely isolate ourselves right now. And, you know, people like Rohani, like the president of Iran, like, you know, the foreign minister Zerif, are pretty savvy. And I think they understand that that creates an opportunity

for Iran. The problem, as you suggested, is going to be, A, they oversold the economic benefits of the nuclear agreement to their own people. It's becoming increasingly difficult to show much economic benefit because the reimposition of U.S. sanctions are taking a toll. And then there's the danger of collisions, whether advertent or inadvertent. And I take that very seriously because, you know, if you look at Syria, if you look at the Gulf itself, if you look at Yemen today, which is both a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe, there are just too many places where you could end up with collisions, whether it's between the United States and Iran or between some of our partners and Iran, and then you can be off to the races in terms of escalation. And, you know,

I don't believe that a lot of the assertions by some people in the current administration that we're just interested in a better deal is really what's animating them. I think this is about trying to produce either the capitulation of the Iranian regime or its implosion. And I think that's an attitude that's not tethered to history, at least in my experience. Yeah, agreed. Frot, to say the least. So, Bill, the last question for you. I mean, the amazing thing about your job as a diplomat is you got to go personally spend time with meet, debate, leaders both famous and celebrated and then infamous all across the globe. People like Putin, I imagine Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, across your radar screen at some point. Were there foreign leaders that you found to be really capable and impressive that you met along the way that stand out? Or I guess the flip side of that, where there are particularly terrible people to deal with that you are glad are no longer your problem? Yeah, I mean, Gaddafi, I mean, Moammar Gaddafi, the former leader of Libya was certainly the strangest foreign leader with whom I ever dealt anyway. You know, that was another set of back channel talks when we were talking to Libyans.

This goes back to the early 2000s when I was running the Middle East Bureau and the State Department. And we were negotiating quietly with the Libyans first about their renunciation of terrorism and the settlement of, you know, their responsibility for the Lockerbie disaster in which, you know, nearly 300, you know, innocent people were killed on an airliner over Scotland. And then ultimately that led to the continuation of talks to get Gaddafi to give up what was a pretty primitive nuclear program at the time. But, you know, during the course of those quiet talks, I met with Gaddafi, I think, three or four times. And, you know, it was always a strange experience. He had this really disarming habit of pausing mid-conversation and then staring at the ceiling. I always assumed he was trying to collect his thoughts, but literally for like three or four minutes. And he always, you know, it was a flashy dresser.

And so at one point he was wearing what looked like a pajama top with images of dead African dictators on. it. And so I would spend the three or four minutes while he was staring at the ceiling trying to identify as many of the dead African dictators as I could. But that was a truly strange experience. I mean, it did produce an outcome that I think served American interests and that we did get Gaddafi to basically move out of the business of terrorism and to give up his nuclear program.

But he remained a weirdly repressively. And that was his undoing, as both of you guys recall vividly, you know, after the revolution in Libya in 2011. That is a very odd set of pajamas to buy on the Amazon or whoever he found was. I lost interest in wearing pajamas after that. I think that a T-shirt sounds just fine. It works better. Bill, thank you so much for doing the show. My pleasure.

Everyone should run. Don't walk to purchase the back channel. it is fantastic. You will hear an infant number of stories like Gaddafi and his PJs and then other much more thoughtful policy stuff. Yeah, no, Bill, it's great talking to you and good luck with the book and everything else you're doing. It's really exciting that everybody else gets to see a glimpse at the remarkable career you've already had. Well, thanks so much to both of you. It's really great talking to you. You too. Have a great one. You too. Bye-bye. Thanks again to Ambassador Bill Burns for joining the show and to Ben Rhodes. As always,

and to all of you great people for listening to the show, for subscribing, for sharing it with your friends, and talk to you next week.