Pod Save the World - Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns

Episode Date: May 31, 2017

Tommy talks with former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns about his three decades at the State Department. They discuss US relations with Russia and Jared Kushner’s backchannel, Trump’s trip to Europe, Bill’s role in leading the Iran talks and what it means to be loyal to a President and country.

Welcome back to Pot Save the World. My guest today is Bill Burns. Bill was the Deputy Secretary of State until 2014, but he is a career staffer of the State Department, which means he is served under Republicans and Democrats. He's also served as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, U.S. ambassador to Jordan. He's one of the most professional, intelligent people I've worked with. He's someone I greatly admire. We talked about Russia, what it means to be a back channel. When is that appropriate? When is it not? We talked about Trump's visit. visit to Europe and is dust up with NATO. We talked about Bill's efforts leading the Iran talks and what it means to be an ambassador and to have discretion in an age where WikiLeaks and Twitter is kind of putting it all out there. It was a great conversation. I really appreciate him joining and I think you'll enjoy listening. Bill Burns, thank you for joining and for all the work you've done. Oh, Tommy, thanks so much for having me. Well, thank you for making time. So I was hoping we could start with Russia because you have more experience living in and working with Russia than most people I'll ever speak to and certainly more than most people who are on the news talking

about the subject. You wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in January that warned against fooling ourselves into thinking that there's easy ways to cooperate. You wrote that the legitimacy of Mr. Putin's system of repressive domestic control depends on the existence of external threats. Can you talk about what that means and how President Putin's worldview impacts our ability to work with him on other policy areas? Sure, and I'd be glad to. And Russia is always a big, complicated subject, especially when you're talking about Putin's Russia. You know, when Putin first became president now more than 15 years ago, I think the basic social contract he tried to establish with Russians was, you stay out of politics. That's my business.

what I'll provide in return are rising standards of living and rising economic growth rates. And that worked pretty well when he was surfing on $110 a barrel oil. But then when oil prices dropped to half of that figure and the sanctions that were imposed after the Ukraine crisis a few years ago started to kick in, it wasn't so easy for Putin to hold up that kind of social contract. So he substituted something that came naturally to him given his KGB training. which was, you know, basically a very chauvinistic view of the rest of the world, pointing at enemies at the gate at other countries, particularly the United States, who he argued were trying to keep Russia down.

And so his argument was, you know, I need this tight system of domestic control or repressive system at home because we've got external enemies out there who are threatening Russia's best interests. Right. And so, I mean, I think what you hear Trump talking about is, well, maybe we can find a way to cooperate. on just counterterrorism or just work together in Syria to sort of try to fix the civil war and fix the political situation there. I mean, do you think that there are ways to carve out those issues and focus on counterterrorism in the same way Obama did with nonproliferation or do they just not applicable?

No, I mean, I think there are ways. And we have to be pretty cold-blooded about this just as Putin himself is as he looks at the United States. There are areas which, you know, serve both of our interests. Counterterrorism cooperation can be one of them. as you said, nonproliferation is another, since the United States and Russia are still the two biggest nuclear powers in the world. My only point is that we shouldn't kid ourselves into thinking that there's some grand bargain that's possible out there where we can, in effect,

trade cooperation on counterterrorism against, you know, compromises on questions like Ukraine or other issues that divide us. Even on counterterrorism, I mean, we have to be a little bit careful because the Russians carry a fair amount of baggage with them, too, in Syria, for example, example, where, you know, they've supported the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which has been responsible largely for the killing of half a million people there, mostly Sunni Arabs, who are 70% of the population of Syria. And so, you know, when you've alienated well over half of your population, it's going to be hard to portray yourself when you're still supporting Bashar al-Assad as the key to, you know, defeating Sunni extremist groups. Right. One thing we've heard a lot,

about lately is meetings between Trump administration officials and Russian officials. Most recently, it's reports from the weekend that Trump's son-in-law and counselor Jared Kushner was trying to develop a back channel to Moscow, a direct line to Moscow. I was hoping we could step back for a bit and talk about this idea of a back channel, maybe demystify it a bit, talk about when it's appropriate and how it's been used. You were the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and I imagine you were tasked to deliver any number of private messages to the government. You were also a member of a small team that held secret talks with Iran, which I'd love to get into in more detail later. What's the point of these back channels and why do you think they're useful to presidents? Sure. Well, you know, most diplomatic

business is done in front channels, you know, through your embassies and other countries, through visits by senior officials, you know, where the subject matter that you're discussing may be confidential, but where the fact of those discussions is visible to everybody. But occasionally back channels are useful for governments, whether the subject matter is really sensitive or you want to test whether you can make progress without the glare of publicity or sometimes when those front channels are really limited. You mentioned the example of Iran, which was one of them. We used the government of Oman in the Gulf to help facilitate that. Henry Kissinger, you know, more than 40 years ago, used the Pakistani government to set up a direct back channel. with the Chinese government in the early 1970s. Ben Rhodes, you know, helped pioneer the conversations with the Cubans in the second term of the Obama administration

using the good offices of the Vatican. So those kind of circumstances, you know, back channels can be very effective. But generally what they do is provide you that quiet opportunity to test the proposition whether you can make some progress. And then you basically make the handoff to a front channel. to continue the process. Right. Do you think it was appropriate, inappropriate to do this during the transition or to consider

using a foreign government's facility in their communications gear, or is that sort of beside the point? No, I think it's really inappropriate. In fact, it's foolish. I mean, all I know is what I, you know, read in the media. But there are two things that are striking about at least what you read. The first is, just as you said, Tommy, it's during a transition. and generally in our country, you know, there's one government at a time.

So while it's natural for there to be context between foreign governments and an incoming administration, generally, you know, you make very clear that you're deferring to the president and the government that's still in power until January 20th. So that's unusual to, at least apparently, be trying to set up a channel to begin to do business before you're actually in office. And then what's especially unusual, and I think, quite disturbing is the notion that should use an adversarial government's secure communications channel as the basis for communication, basically so that you're cutting out your own government,

whether you don't trust them or whatever. And that's a big problem, I think. Yeah, that struck me as strange. I mean, you lived in Moscow, you worked in Moscow, you were the ambassador, you lived in the embassy. How do you think relations are now compared to other points of friction in our history. Where would you judge things? Relations are at a, you know, a really complicated point at a low point, I think, right now where there's huge mistrust on both sides. I think the, you know, rushing hacking of our election over the past year is a very serious challenge to our own democratic system. So there are lots of reasons for mistrust on our side. Having said that, you know, we don't have the luxury of

just ignoring Russia. It's still a big, important country in the world. Our relationship is going to be at best competitive and oftentimes adversarial. And so we're going to need to manage that, I think. But we should do it, as I was saying before, without any great illusions, I think, about early breakthroughs or partnerships. My last question on Russia is I was struck by the press conference from the newly elected president, Emmanuel Macron from France. He did a press conference where he stood next to President Putin. and he called RT and Sputnik to Kremlin-backed news agencies lying propaganda. Do you think that truth-telling is necessary inappropriately when a country is bracently interfered in our political system?

Or is that a display of, you called it in your op-ed, gratuitous disrespect that you warned against? And I think that some people said Obama might have committed when he dismissed Russia as a regional power that acted more out of weakness than strength. Yeah, I mean, I remember President Obama's comment about. better regional power. And, you know, my only reaction to that is it's a pretty goddamn big region, you know, across the time zones. But I don't, I think what President Macron said was very straightforward. And I admire it. And he spoke the truth. And a lot of times in diplomacy, that's exactly what you have to do. Yeah. Right. Speaking of Europe, President Trump just wrapped up his first foreign trip, included meetings at NATO, a G7 meeting, any number of conversations bilaterally

with European allies. To me, the most striking thing that came out this week was, his refusal to publicly recommit to honoring Article 5, which stipulates that NATO allies must come to the aid of an ally under attack. After that trip, Chancellor Merkel said that Europe can't rely on the U.S. and the U.K. anymore and must take destiny in our own hands. Are these sort of a blunt statement of current political reality, or is this something larger and more troubling? I think it is something larger, and we ought to be worried about it as well, because, you know, we take for granted our closest allies in the world at our own peril.

I mean, those alliances, especially the transatlantic alliance, is what sets us apart from lonelier powers like Russia or China who don't have the benefit of large alliance systems or systems of partners to help deal with lots of the 21st century problems before us. So, you know, I think when you have, you know, one of your closest allies expressing that kind of concern, it is, you know, in a larger sense, very troubling. Yeah. I mean, I guess my question is, how do we get people to understand that and to care? Because I find myself complaining about it on Twitter or whatever. I just sound like kind of a we need that we should stand by our European friends. I mean, is there a tangible example

that we should point people to about why this is so important that we have these great relationships with allies like the Europeans? Yeah, I mean, I think you have to be practical about it to, I mean, first thing I'd say is there was nothing wrong with, you know, President Trump or, you know, Secretary Mattis or others expressing concern about our NATO allies not contributing as much to our collective defense as they ought to. That's something that their predecessors have done. I remember when Bob Gates was leaving a secretary of defense, he delivered a very pointed message to that effect, you know, in Brussels. So that's important to do, but how you do it is also really important because just as you were suggesting, Tommy, you want to do it in a way in which you're providing

some reassurance, some sense of empathy for what Europeans are going through right now, and a clear sense of our commitment to Article 5 to the fact that we buy into the notion that an attack on any one NATO allies is an attack on all of us. So I do think you have to be practical, though. You can't just invoke the importance of alliances for the sake of alliances. I think the reality is, as you look back over the history of the last, century. It's the success of the NATO alliance that enabled Europe to avoid repeating the awful wars of the first half of the last century, World War I and World War II. It's the success of the NATO alliance that helped produce success in the Cold War for the United States and our partners.

And it really is the NATO alliance, along with our other alliances around the world, that gives us a leg up in dealing with lots of challenges around the world that no one country is going to be to solve. So whether it's, you know, conflict in the Middle East or even problems of climate change, it's not so much NATO itself as a mechanism, but our transatlantic partners who share, you know, a common interest in dealing with those problems and also have a common set of values, which informs how they go about doing that. Right. One of the collective challenges I think we needed Europe to address was Iran. Right. You were part of a small team that held secret talks with Iran to broker the Iran deal. But interesting,

Interestingly, you actually started pushing for more engagement with Iran back in 2008 during the Bush administration when it was a far more lonely position, especially I imagine, within the situation room at that time. Why did you push for talks early? And did you see changes from 2008 to 2014 when we were ultimately successful and getting a deal that led to that success? Yeah, I mean, I did. It just seemed to me that this is without any illusions, that this was one of those cases where, you know, giving your fullest effort to diplomacy was, you know, critical for the United States and for our partners. If you look at, you know, the problem that Iran's nuclear program posed, the fact that the Iranians insisted this was a civilian program, but we had lots of reasons for

mistrust since they weren't transparent about what they were doing since in 2009, as you know and remember, our intelligence community, you know, discovered a secret site that they had built into the side of a mountain, not exactly the best advertisement for a civilian nuclear science. So we had lots of reasons to be mistrustful. But the problem was, if you looked at the tools available to us for dealing with this problem, the use of force was certainly one of them. But what you couldn't bomb away was the know-how that Iranian scientists had developed. They knew their way around the nuclear fuel cycle.

They knew how to enrich material potentially to weapons grade. And so what you needed to do was to test whether you could make diplomacy effective. In order to do that, you had to do two things. You had to build leverage on the one hand, and on the other hand, you had to make clear you were prepared to engage with them directly and with the Iranians. And that's what we had not been prepared to do until the very end of the Bush administration. When I was, you know, instructed to join the so-called P5 plus one countries, the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany, in a set of discussions with the Iranians.

And, you know, in a sense, what then President Obama tried to do was both a test of whether the Iranians were serious about a negotiated resolution, but it was also an investment in that wider international solidarity. So we could make clear that we're not the problem. We're prepared to sit down and deal directly with the Iranians, however mistrustful we may be. But it was their unwillingness to deal in a constructive way in those negotiations that enabled us to go to our partners and, to go to the Russians and Chinese as well and say, you know, we're going to have to build greater leverage and step up sanctions pressure against the Iranians. And that's really what took place over the first term of President Obama's presidency, put us in a position by the beginning at 2013 in his second term where, you know, Iranians' oil exports had dropped by 50 percent, the value of their currency had dropped by 50 percent, and their minds were focused. So that gave

us a diplomatic opportunity. Right. I remember going, not during the secret talks, I remember going with you and that team to the P5 plus one talks in Geneva. And, you know, my memories of that trip were that this beautiful Swiss chalet filled with foreign diplomats was one of the cooler places I'd ever been in my life. I remember paying $50 for a hamburger, but there wasn't a lot of success that came out of it. How did you keep fighting for more engagement and keep pushing the government forward to get people to support these talks when there's not necessarily any political. political upside back home to support that effort? Well, I mean, I think all of us understood, certainly President Obama and Secretary Clinton

and then Secretary Kerry understood what was at stake, you know, because the dangers of failing diplomatically, of failing to work in an arrangement to constrain the Iranian nuclear program, you know, brought you closer to the very real possibility of military conflict. And we've seen, you know, the huge cost of military conflicts in the Middle East over the last 15 years. So there was a lot at stake. and I think all of our minds were focused as well. Yeah.

So, I mean, I think, you know, our challenge then was, you know, how do you supply what had been the missing link up until that point? It was an opportunity to speak directly and quietly to the Iranians themselves to test, you know, whether or not you could make progress in negotiations. Not as a way around the P5 plus one process because it was really important for us to work with our allies and our partners. But as a way of testing whether or not the Iranians were serious and then taking whatever progress we could make in those direct talks with the Iranians, those bilateral talks between the United States and Iran, back into the larger P5 plus one process. You're geeking out with me on POTSave the world. More on the way.

President Trump just got back from Saudi Arabia where he gave a speech during which he called on Arab leaders to further isolate Iran. That strategy of aligning mostly Sunni Arab nations against Iran felt very familiar. It felt like a return to something that had been tried. Do you think that kind of pressure track has a chance of success, or is there a better strategy out there that you think we should consider? Well, I mean, the real challenge right now, I think, is to do two things simultaneously, and that's always a big challenge in diplomacy. The first, I believe, at least, is to continue to implement the Iranian nation. nuclear agreement, which was finally reached a couple of years ago, and which I do think is the best of the available alternatives preventing the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon.

But at the same time, to embed that effort in a wider strategy, which recognizes that, you know, Iranian actions threaten our interests, threaten the interests of a lot of our friends across the Middle East, in some, you know, pretty serious ways. And so we have to work with, you know, our Arab partners to push back against that, but not to do it in a way which, you know, causes us to walk away from the Iranian nuclear agreement. And that's, all of that is a lot easier said than done, but that's really the dilemma out there right now. Yeah. He also told those same leaders, I think it was a GCC meeting or a group of Arab states that the U.S. would no longer lecture them on issues like human rights. And that comment kind of brought me back to those first tumultuous months of the Arab Spring

when we were constantly trying to strike the balance between standing up for universal rights like freedom of expression and assembly with not interfering in the affairs of a sovereign country or being perceived as interfering in the affairs of a sovereign country. I'm wondering what you thought of those remarks and critics of Obama's policy, you might say, you supported the protesters in Egypt. You said Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt must go and look what that got us. It's a much less reliable ally. Their economy is collapsed. We'd be better off if we'd back the guy. guys in charge. I mean, it's one thing to talk about sort of tone and style.

And, you know, most people around the world don't like being lectured to or patronized by the United States. So I can understand that part. But I think it's a huge mistake for the United States to go mute on, you know, issues of human rights. And I say that not just for moral or ethical reasons because of, you know, what we value most in our own system, you know, political and economic openness, a respect for human dignity, a sense of possibility. But there's also a practical concern because leaderships and societies

which don't address those kind of concerns, which don't respect people's dignity, ultimately become brittle and break. And that's what happened, as you well remember, you know, six years ago at the beginning of the Arab Revolutions and the Arab Spring. And so, you know, it just makes practical sense to be clear as friends that, you know, governments need to take those things into account and begin to open up opportunities for their own citizens to have a greater sense of economic possibility and political possibility, a respect for minority rights, respect for, you know, the various kinds of freedoms which are so important for us. And, you know, how you go about doing that is going to vary from relationship to relationship. You know, there are going to be some complicated

trade-off sometimes in relationships where we have to hold our noses about some kinds of abuse, is because people perceive a kind of immediate, you know, security need that we have to pay attention to. But I just think it's a huge mistake and it's very short-sighted for us to think that those issues are just going to go away. You know, the Arab Spring is going to end up repeating itself if leaderships in that region don't pay attention to those kind of challenges. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the most interesting things is clearly there's been a lot of change, but there hasn't been a lot of political reform in most of these countries.

But what you're describing is like a tough love conversation. How did you as a diplomat fly to a foreign capital as a guest in a foreign head of states office and push them on these things or call them out on on human rights abuses, for example? I mean, was that difficult? It's always, yeah, it's always hard because the natural human temptation is to make it, you know, number 15 on your list of issues you're going to cover in your talking points and you never quite get to it. But as I said, you know, that's what I think good diplomacy is about. You've got to be just as direct about difficult subjects like that as you are, you know, about issues of common interest and cooperation. And so, you know, I can remember lots of different times,

whether it was in the Middle East or in Russia or other places I served, where it was really important to raise those kind of issues as of abuses, you know, whether it was in Russia abuses that were taken place when I served there the first time during the war in Chechnya and the Middle East. 1990s, where you saw horrific abuses, you know, committed against civilians. And then, you know, same thing was true in dealing with, you know, a number of our, you know, Arab partners, whether it's President Mubarak and Egypt or others, where it was important to raise those kind of issues. You can try to put them in terms of their self-interest and the importance of them if they want

to attract foreign investment and open up their economies to pay attention to the rule of law because that's going to matter in practical economic terms. But you also got to raise some really uncomfortable issues related to human rights as well. You don't always have to do it at great length in public, but you've got to mix, you know, being willing to raise those issues publicly with a willingness to, just as you were suggesting, I'm engaging some tough love privately too. Right. One of the things that I think made you a great diplomat is that you're known for your discretion.

You're a soft-spoken person. I was in a thousand meetings with you in the situation. room, and even when you were the most senior person in the room, you were rarely the person who spoke the most. You listened. You didn't speak to hear yourself talk. Is that a lost art? And how do we conduct diplomacy in an age of Twitter, in an age of omnipresent surveillance? How do you have discrete diplomatic conversations with social media and WikiLeaks looming around everything we do? Yeah, it's a good question, Tommy. And I think a lot of those times when I probably wasn't fill in the air with my own wisdom, it was simply because I didn't have a lot.

offer, given some of the issues we were dealing with in that wonderful room with no windows, the situation room. I think, you know, I think diplomacy, this won't surprise you since I did it professionally for three and a half decades, remains as important as ever, because even in an age of, you know, sort of information technology revolution where there are lots of different ways for people inside governments and outside governments to communicate, you know, it's still, a lot still depends on building human relationships and having. a practical sense of how you navigate other societies overseas and the pursuit of American interests and then being able to explain American policy in terms that people understand.

So you've got to take advantage of all of those new means of communication, social media, and everything else. But at the end of the day, you also have to focus a lot on those kind of human relationships, not just with senior government officials, but also with people across societies as well. Because one of the things that I learned during the Obama administration in particular was that diplomacy is not just about relations between governments anymore. It's also about relations between societies. I mean, I think another lost art of diplomacy that people talk about is writing cables back to Washington that are informative, but also, I think, entertaining enough to get read. You wrote one about a wedding you attended, and Degasan, I believe, with Ramzan Kedirov, who is the president of Chechnya,

That is, when it was finally released as part of the WikiLeaks cache, was seen as one of the most entertaining write-ups of a wedding in a political situation ever read. I don't know if you're allowed to describe that or if you can talk more generally about how you approached the need to report back to Washington about what you were seeing and how to get people to actually pay attention to it with the need for discretion in the conversations you were having. Yeah, well, actually, that particular cable was written by a colleague of mine. But, you know, I had the opportunity over the course of my career to, you know, write lots of cables. And I always felt, especially the places I was serving in the Middle East and in Russia, you know, if you couldn't inject some color in those places and describing those places, then you needed to find another profession. And I continue to think that, you know, in a world in which we're just deluged with information, you know, good diplomatic reporting, just like good journalism overseas, helps people to distill what's most.

important about a particular issue and helps people understand that flood of information that they're literally drowning in sometimes and in order to get people's attention and sharpen that focus you know sometimes you want to illustrate that whether it's with a colorful conversation you just had or you know some odd event that you just witnessed in another country so there's an there's an art to that and I think good diplomats can continue to be really effective even at a time when compared to when I came into the foreign service three and a half decades ago, you know, the amount of information flowing around out

there is vastly greater. You're listening to Pod Save the World. Stick around. There's more great show coming your way. Switching gears a little bit. The Trump administration has proposed huge cuts to the State Department's budget to USAID's budget for foreign assistance. A lot of observers and members of Congress have said that budget's dead on arrival.

It's not going to happen. But at the same time, you have a Secretary of State that hasn't filled many. if any of the top jobs in the agency. I'm wondering if you could help us understand in practical terms what that lack of staffing means, what isn't getting done, and what troubles you about the proposed cuts and the seeming refusal to hire a team. Sure. Well, this is that, you know, of all the different transitions I've witnessed, you know,

and I've seen five or six of them from one administration to another over the course of my career. You know, this is the slowest one in terms of putting people in senior positions. I think, as you were saying, in the State Department now, there's only about two or three of 50 positions that have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate in which you actually have appointees in place. And I think probably about 40 percent of our embassies overseas right now are lacking an ambassador. So that costs you, I think, in a number of different ways, in part because it's probably going to be the beginning in 2018 before you have, you know, some critical assistant secretaries in place, you know, the ones running the big, regional bureaus covering the Middle East or Asia or Europe. And that comes at a cost. I mean, first, it tends to marginalize the State Department in Washington terms where, you know, you're not

represented consistently at a senior level. Second, it marginalizes you sometimes with foreign governments who get kind of accustomed to working around the State Department. And third, I think it marginalizes diplomacy in a sense in the wider arc of American foreign policy. And it kind of reinforces a pattern that we've seen, in my view, anyway, all too often since 9-11, where the tool of first resort in American national security policy is the U.S. military. Now, I have enormous admiration for the U.S. military is by far the best and most effective in the world, but any number of senior U.S. military officers that you and I both know will be the strongest advocates for, you know, well-resourced diplomacy because what you want to try to ensure is that you're making every effort and exhausting

every tool short of the use of force to try to prevent conflicts from breaking out or minimizing their consequences. And that means that you've got to focus on diplomacy as your tool of first resort, not as a kind of under-resourced afterthought. And that's one of the sort of dangerous patterns, I think, in which we can fall into. You know, I spent a lot of time in the State Department over the years, there's a hugely powerful case for streamlining the State Department, and, you know, you've got too many layers of authority sometimes there. But when you're talking about 30% budget cuts in a relatively small institution like the State Department or 30% budget cuts in foreign assistance, it reflects a kind of diminished view of the value of diplomacy and of the value of foreign

assistance too because, you know, a little bit of preventive investment in fragile societies can help prevent situations in which the U.S. military gets dragged in ultimately at far greater cost in terms of human life and, you know, financial assets of the United States. So, you know, as you can tell, I'm a big believer in trying to invest a little bit in diplomacy. Yeah, and invest in people. I think people don't always understand what a career staffer means and a political. local staffer. You were someone who was a foreign service officer. You served in all these countries. You speak several languages. Why did you get drawn to the State Department? And what is your, you know, if you're a 17, 8 year old, 20 year old kid listening to this, what would your pitch be to him or her about

why they should join the Foreign Service and serve their country? Well, I think, I mean, just in terms of my own background, I grew up as an Army brat. My dad was an Army officer. And so I kind of moved all over the place around the United States and in Germany when I was a kid. But, But through my father's eyes, I developed, you know, a real appreciation for public service. And so I wanted to try something a little different than he had done in terms of public service. And when I was in graduate school in England, I went down to the U.S. Embassy and took the Foreign Service exam. And much to my surprise passed it, entered the Foreign Service, certainly did not expect to be doing it for more than a few years. And, you know, 33 years later, I was still at it.

It's a hugely important opportunity, it seems to me, being an American diplomat, to make a difference in the world in the promotion of the interests of your own country. There's nothing that I found quite as satisfying professionally as representing your country overseas, you know, whether you're a junior diplomat or as an ambassador. You're the embodiment of the United States for a lot of people overseas, not just those in governments. And, you know, it's a real source of pride to be able to represent your country, its interests, its values, and to make a difference in the world. It has its share of frustrations. It can sometimes be very complicated for your family and your kids moving from school to school. There's no such thing as zero risk in diplomacy. And, you know, sadly, I've seen a number of my colleagues, you know, killed while serving overseas during the course of my career.

But it's usually satisfying. I remember there's a famous quote from Teddy Roosevelt, the former president, who once said that life's greatest good fortune is the opportunity to work hard at work worth doing. And, you know, by that standard, I was extraordinarily fortunate to be an American diplomat. And a lot of presidents were extraordinary lucky to have you on their team. Somehow the United States survived. Yeah, my 33 years. So this is my final question for you. President Trump allegedly pressed the FBI director Jim Comey repeatedly for his loyalty,

and Comey says he appropriately refused. I know neither of us have any knowledge of that conversation. I'm not trying to make this partisan. But it's an interesting debate because you served under Democrats and Republicans. Obviously, the answer is, you know, you were loyal to your country first, foremost, and period. But I'm curious how you think about loyalty generally, because there is some loyalty to the person in charge at that time, right? There's loyalty to their policies, to being discreet about their views and deliberations. How did you think about that question when you were serving in government and when you served as an administration shifted from one individual to another?

It's a really good question, Tommy. I mean, I think you've got to think of it in two ways. I mean, in the first sense, the most obvious one, there's a professional discipline that's involved. You owe it to the people who were elected or appointed, as in the case of a Secretary of State, to carry out policies that reflect their decisions. And even if you have serious reservations about them, you know, not to run off to the press and leak information, I mean, that's a part of the discipline that comes with the oath that you take and your loyalty. But there's another kind of loyalty, which I think is equally important,

and that is that you are duty-bound to be honest when you have concerns and to speak truth to power. And that is a very difficult thing to do inside institutions sometimes in the State Department, for example, in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. I was running the Middle East Bureau in the State Department. Colin Powell was the secretary. And I think most of my colleagues in the Near East Bureau had real misgivings about the way in which we were going about. preparations for that conflict, which turned out to be, I think, a tragic dead end and a huge mistake in American foreign policy. We tried as best we could to express our concerns.

I remember Powell asked at one point one morning at our senior staff meeting if we could produce, you know, a kind of memo which he could send to the White House, which would lay out all the kinds of things that could go wrong. And about 7 o'clock that night, a member he called and said, where's the memo? We were on about page 15 of a memo that we'd entitled The Perfect Storm, which, you know, reflected as best we could some of our concerns about what could happen in a post-conflict Iraq after Saddam Hussein was pushed out of power. And I reread it a few years ago, and we got it about half right. We got some things right and missed others. But I use it only as an example of an honest effort, at least, you know, to provide our best judgment, even if it was inconvenient for some

of the people who were then making decisions. So, you know, that's what you're duty-bound to do, and that's a part of loyalty as well inside the government. Some of my colleagues, whether it was over Iraq or, you know, in the Balkans over Bosnia in the 1990s, felt they couldn't in good conscience continue to serve because they disagreed so adamantly with policy and they resigned. And I had huge admiration for those who did that and I respected their decisions, but I also had admiration for people who stayed within the system, but who were honest enough to reflect their concerns. Yeah. I mean, just thinking about that memo a bit, when you think back to the run-up to Iraq and then managing everything that came after, and when you think about the agonizing

deliberations we went through in the eventual decision to ultimately engage in Syria and arm opposition and support others, do you think we over-corrected from the experience? from Iraq and that we were too hesitant to engage in Syria at a time when it might have made a difference? Yeah, it's a really good question, and I've agonized over that myself, as I'm sure you have and lots of our colleagues have. It's always difficult to determine, you know, what's overreach of the sort that I think we saw in Iraq in 2003 and what's underreach as well.

And in American foreign policy, are always pulled back and forth between those two things. I guess as I look back on Syria, and I certainly have no monopoly on wisdom on that issue, I got a lot of things wrong over the years. I think it's hard to argue, given the magnitude of the human disaster that's unfolded there, that we shouldn't have tried harder earlier in the conflict, some combination of things through a more aggressive arming of the opposition, a willingness to use in a carefully measured way. U.S. force at different points, you know, harnessing the efforts of a lot of regional players who are pulling in different directions. You know, that might have made a difference, might have given us some greater leverage to produce a serious diplomatic process in Syria. I can't, you know, say with any kind of certainty that that would have been the case. And I had a huge respect for a lot of President Obama's concerns during that period. But it's hard to argue when you're looking at,

nearly half a million deaths in Syria and the consequences of spillover from Syria into the neighborhood and into Europe itself, that, you know, we should have tried a little bit harder earlier on. And, you know, one of the things that, you know, if you add up everything that the United States did over a period of four or five years in terms of support for the opposition and some of the other steps we've taken, it's actually, you know, a fairer. fairly significant expenditure of American capital, but we did it over, you know, in such a gradual way that I think it lost some of the impact it might have had. So maybe if we had telescoped it a little more earlier on in the conflict, it might have had a bigger impact.

Agonizing over these issues is right. And I think we all will think about this for a long time. Bill, thank you so much for being on the show today. I miss working with you. You were someone who inspired a lot of people that came into the White House with no experience working with diplomats or in national security who looked up to you and were impressed by your professionalism and the great work you did. So thank you for joining me today. Tommy, it's really a pleasure. Take good care of yourself. You too.