Pod Save the World - Ronan Farrow

Episode Date: May 2, 2018

Tommy talks with Pulitzer Prize winning author Ronan Farrow about his new book War on Peace and the militarization of American foreign policy. 

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. Thank you guys for tuning in. As always, I'm recording my introduction from the Crooked Media Global Headquarters Studio. But that is not where this conversation took place. On Sunday, I sat down with Ronan Farrow, Pulitzer Prize winning author to talk about his new book, War on Peace, the decline of diplomacy and the increased focus on military solutions to huge foreign policy problems. We covered a lot of ground in the conversation, including his time working at the State Department, and the work here. on Afghanistan policy. We covered fights between his team and the White House and how those fights manifested into policy choices that prioritized the Defense Department over the State Department. We had some laughs. You wouldn't always expect that in a 45-minute conversation of foreign policy, but we had some yucks. Anyway, the book is great. I highly recommend you read it. A lot of people ask me, what books should I read to get smart on foreign policy? Add this one to your list. And if you don't believe me, here's the interview to prove you wrong. Hello, everyone. Hello, Tommy.

Hey, Ronan. This is great. Thank you guys for coming out. What a great crowd on a Sunday in Santa Monica. Luckily, it's raining and crappy out. Caring about the state of the world. Yes, caring about the state of the world, not the state of right now. So I am thrilled to be here with Ronan Farrow. He's a journalist, a lawyer, former State Department official who can now add Pulitzer Prize winner to his very long resume. Clap for that. Thank you, Tommy. He is also the author of the new book, War on Peace, which he's here to talk about today. But I just first want to say, I've known Ronan for a long time. I've seen him bleary-eyed after pulling All-Niters working on the book,

and then going and making calls about Harvey Weinstein when it was socially acceptable to do so on the West Coast. Journalism is a very hard job. Writing about this subject matter is even more emotionally difficult and exhausting. That gets harder when the person you're writing about. can intimidate you and threaten you and hire former Mossad agents to make you feel like your life is at risk, like your work is at risk. And it's even harder when, you know, the parent company with the lawyers and the money goes a little soft, and you have to pay out of your own pocket to get a cameraman to come to film something the next day

because it matters to you. So let's give it off Ronan again. Thank you, Tommy. Thank you, everyone. It means a lot. So I want to talk about foreign policy today. But I just want to ask you one question about the Me Too movement that your reporting and the New York Times' reporting helps spark, which was there have been some reports lately that some of the folks accused of sexual misconduct, some of the men accused of sexual misconduct, are now plotting a comeback. And I was curious what you made of those stories.

The mere existence of those stories is interesting to me. And the message it sends to the women that you got to know who are harassed, who are not seeing a lot of reporting on the next phases of their careers, which in many people, instances were put to an end by people like Harvey Weinstein. Look, my job has never been to take out high-profile men or to met out judgment on who should come back or not. I would make one important point that I think is often lost in the conversation and that I hear a lot from survivors of sexual violence, which is the correct focus here is on those survivors and their stories.

The aim that they had and that I had was not to take out anyone. It was to make sure survivors would be heard. And vulnerable people who had been silenced by very powerful men abusing their power would be heard. And, you know, I think the moment we become immersed in headlines about whose career is coming back and when, we lose sight of the most important sign of incremental progress we have, which is that finally we're paying attention to, in the case of Harvey Weinstein, the women, now it's women and men across the country in many of these cases, the people finally becoming brave enough to speak the truth about this issue.

So I hope people keep the spotlight there. Me too. Okay. So I get asked a lot, what books should I read about foreign policy to make me smarter? And that's a broad subject area, and it's a hard one to answer. But I would highly recommend War on Peace, because Ronan tells the story, of his experience in government and these larger-than-life people he worked with during that time to make a broader point about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy and some of the repercussions

of that policy choice. So let's start there with your work with Richard Holbrook on Afghanistan policy. A couple questions. Who was Richard Holbrook? What did you do with him when you worked in the office of the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan? And you write in the book that he was the closest thing to a father that you had. What did he mean to you? So when I went into the State Department, I was a wet behind the ears kid. I was straight out of law school and I had gone to law school young, so doubly so I was green. The foreign policy background I had was in Africa, not Afghanistan. But Richard Holbrook was a guy who valued outside voices. He liked to upset old norms. And he was a good reminder that, prizing expertise doesn't necessarily mean being a traditionalist or being a dusty bureaucrat. And, you know, right now we're seeing this crisis where there's really a transformation in America's role in the world that we are not empowering our experts and our negotiators and the people who

can make deals to keep our brave servicemen and women out of the line of fire. We are shooting first and asking questions later. And I thought Richard Holbrook, this, as you say, larger than life, that I had was a great lens through which to view that because he was an example of the kind of expertise that we're sidelining. He was an example of the kind of diplomatic brio that we no longer value as a culture. He described his approach to negotiation as a combination of mountain climbing and chess. And, you know, he was a jerk by many people's accounts. He, you know, was very, very ego-driven. He was often oblivious to people around him.

I tell the story of an ex of his standing in the rain with him after a meal one time. It's like a torrential downpour in New York. There's no cabs, and they wait, and they wait, and then finally a cab comes and he hails it, and he gives her a peck on the cheek, and then jumps into the cab himself and leaves her there in the rain. And that was Richard Holbrook to a tea, but he was also...

incredibly loyal. He was a wonderful mentor. He really did empower good ideas wherever he found them. And he spent his last days decrying to me and others around him and in secret recordings and memos that he sent to Hillary Clinton

that I'm making public in this book for the first time. The trend that is the foundation of this book, he said that the review process in the Obama administration of Afghanistan was overtaken by what he called Milthink, that the White House was crowded with celebrity generals, and there wasn't room for peacemakers to ever enter the process. He wasn't being heard, and yes, there were these political reasons that he was a difficult guy,

but also there was a fundamental shift where between the last time he made peace in Bosnia and this last mission, we became a nation that doesn't value the thing that he does that is so important to our country. Yeah. In the office that you guys worked in, their whole goal was to get to peace-top to get a negotiated settlement to end the war. And it's notable that that office doesn't exist anymore under the Trump administration. I was back at the State Department recently, and it has been replaced by a counter-ISO office,

which is a much more tactical and kind of military conversation that's happening there. And kind of being handled in some other parts of the government, too. Oh, yes. Yes. There's some money going towards counter-isol. I think even more so than in the case of Afghanistan, early in the Obama administration, where Richard Holbrook at least had this team

and was banging his head against the wall in a fairly high-profile way, trying to get his voice heard and diplomats and experts involved in the policy process. Now you really have, on ISIL and a whole range of other issues around the world, a conversation where we've just kind of ceded it to the Pentagon wholesale. Yeah. Back to the SRAP office, the Holbrook's office, one of the most important things they tried to do was get to peace talks, and they were incredibly close-held secrets. It was a compartmental code word level program, which is, you know, a small people know about these talks because they are so secret, they're so fraught. They had to be conducted in places like secluded villas

in Bavaria, like all the KG spy stuff you have read about. You need to develop a process to even figure out, is this human being sitting across from me able to speak for the Taliban? Can you tell us about those talks and introduce everyone here to a character in the book named Arod? Yeah. So the Taliban. Bonn talks, as Tommy was saying, were completely verboten to talk about in the

public space. We had to all kind of pretend this wasn't happening. And Richard Holbrook, who believed that we would never fully win militarily, that we had to use a combination of military might and diplomatic endeavor to bring people to the table

and find some kind of a political settlement however imperfect, because that is the only way out. That was an idea that was not embraced by the mainstream at the time, people were very politically frightened of it. The great irony of Richard Holbrook's last failed mission and his last days and how silenced he was is that now a lot of people do accept that.

It's a very mainstream idea now that we're not going to get out of Afghanistan without a political settlement. And he, nevertheless, even though it was not a well-received in making that kind of the top priority. And it was something of a moonshot, but he did make inroads. There were a number of occasions where those inroads were actively sabotaged by the White House and by the military.

General Petraeus was dead set against this, a lot of large figures in the administration. The Petraeus being opposed to peace talk surprised me, because when he was in Iraq as part of the team leading the Iraq surge, certainly the increase in troops helped get to a much less fraught situation in Iraq at the time. but there was also a broad reconciliation effort where extremists laid down their arms. I would think that he would want peace talks. So the debate in a number of these places is between they use these two terms to describe different things, reconciliation and reintegration. And broadly speaking, reintegration is you get the low-level guys and get them to lay down their arms.

And reconciliation is a higher-level process where you're talking to the leadership. And what Petraeus says, and he's very frank on the record in this book, and he sticks to his guns on this view is, you know, I thought that, yes, reintegration of these low-level guys was important, and we tried to facilitate that, but no, I didn't think you could ever talk to the high-level guys. And Richard Holbrook disagreed on that. And I think, you know, what many of the generals, including John Allen, who commanded the troops there for a while, now say is, yeah, we missed a huge window of opportunity where we had maximum diplomatic leverage, because we had all these troops on the ground, and we could have pushed

towards a political settlement, and we didn't because of this opposition to Holbrook, because of this waning power that diplomacy has. So we lost a lot of opportunities in Afghanistan, and in Holbrook's story that you asked about, that culminated in conversations in secret in a Bavarian village with a guy named A-Rod, who was a Taliban representative, and as you say, it was very difficult to determine whether he was the real deal and it took a lot of time. And at the very end, right before Richard Holbrook died, as it turned out, they had their first kind of breakthrough meeting with him. And it seemed like there might be a chance to finally bring diplomacy back to the four. You mentioned the review of Afghanistan policy the President Obama ordered in 2009.

The thinking behind that review was he'd already sent, I think, 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan right when we got there because there was a concern genuinely that the capital could fall, that major population centers could be overrun by Taliban, and we just need to prop them up short-term. His thinking was, before I sent another 20, 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, we should fundamentally question, why are we here, what are our goals, what's the cost, what are the tactics, what are the strategy? That process included 10 meetings with the president himself in the White House Situation Room, and to get to 10 meetings with the president, that means countless. other meetings under lower levels of the government to prepare for them. As you alluded to,

that process also created enormous tension between Ambassador Holbrook and the White House. Can you talk about that tension and how you think it impacted policy? Maybe is there a lesson there? One of the things that makes Richard Holbrook such an interesting and compelling lens to which to view this phenomenon of the decline of the diplomat is that he had been a young diplomat decades earlier in Vietnam. He was a young Foreign Service officer stationed in the Mekong Delta, and at that time he saw yet another, first of all, tactically similar situation. You know, you have a safe haven across a porous border, a wily guerrilla enemy force that never seemed to quit, and more importantly, a military that kept pushing for escalation even so. And a White House, in his view, I think in both parts of

American history that wasn't hearing the voices from the ground saying, this is not working, we've got to stop. And so if you look back, he actually wrote one chapter of the Pentagon papers where he articulated a lot of that, that General West Morland kept saying, we need more troops. And people like him on the ground were filing memos saying, you know, this isn't working, we've got to pull out. And I think while he was careful to draw a lot of sharp distinctions between these two conflicts. He really did feel the weight of history on his shoulders. Henry Kissinger in this book

said, I think, an incredibly insightful thing, which is, you know, and he said it in his deep Henry Kissinger voice. My accent work isn't the best. That's pretty good. Like, you know, he sounds like he's just echoing directly out of Nixon's Oval Office. He hasn't talked to, you know,

a person my age in 50 years and has no idea. who I am. He was very gracious to give the interview. And one of the things he said was, you know, that we have these politicians who are fixated on innovation and trying something new. And he leaned back, and he said from this great distance seemingly, it is one great American myth that you can always try something new.

And he was talking about Richard Holbrook in the Obama administration, that Holbrook would come into these meetings you just described and say, you know, well, here's how it plays. played in Vietnam. Here's why we should watch out and be aware of the lessons of history. And it really alienated an administration that was in a lot of ways about new ideas. The stories about Holbrook, you know, being this larger-than-life figure, you know, taking the Pakistani ambassadors to the U.S. out to movies and ice cream when their wives were out of town. I mean, he was such a throwback. The way he thought, the way he talked,

the way he viewed history and his role in it, it felt like a different era. And I was thinking about Vietnam, you know, Kennedy has to appoint a person of stature like Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to be his ambassador, because that person at that time was physically there and spoke for the president. Today, if the president needs to talk to, say, the president of Afghanistan, they walk down to the situation room and they have a secure video conference with Kabul. It's top secret. It's immediate and then it's done. Do you think that technology has just sort of fundamentally changed the role of a diplomat, or is that dismissing the importance of that Holbrookian face-to-fakes relationship building? Well, I think both things are true. It is certainly the case that the fact that you don't need to

deliver a letter on heavy cardstock with a wax seal on it in a foreign land. Game of Thrones? Totally, yeah. You don't need your like House Lanister stamp on it. Has made the role of the ambassador less magical and special, you know? They don't need to perform that basic function anymore. But in a range of crises we face around the world, from Iran to North Korea to Afghanistan, where we're now escalating yet again, I do think that now more than ever we need experts. And people who are trained in thinking strategically about, okay, here are the pressure points, here's how we can push towards a peaceful solution, here's how it's going to echo potentially over decades. rather than just what the military does, which is equally important but needs a counterbalance,

which is, you know, we're going to think tactically about what's going to work in the theater of combat. Right. I think that if we had Barack Obama with us today and we put a lie detector on his arm and lie detector technology actually worked, which it does not, that's only in movies, I think he would probably concede that the decision to send tens and tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan was not worth the cost in terms of lives lost, men and women wounded, not of money spent. Looking back, I mean, do you agree, do you think that if we had a time machine, which might be more realistic technology than a lie detector again, very ridiculous,

that there was a better policy that Holbrook or someone else would have put forward that might have led to a better outcome? I think that for sure we squandered that window of opportunity that I talked about. Early on. early on. You look at Bosnia as a precedent, and it's a very different kind of conflict in a lot of ways, but similarly fractious parties, and importantly, similarly imperfect possible outcomes. So the Dayton Peace Accord that Holbrook brokered was a highly flawed arrangement. You know, it gave too much power to the aggressors, had a lot of different compromises, it empowered groups

along ethnic lines. There's all sorts of valid critiques of Dayton. But that's kind of what effective diplomacy looks like. It's about compromise and it's about realizing that sometimes to stop the bloodshed, you have to come to the solution that's available and that that's a vastly safer and better option than doing nothing or having only the military option at your disposal. And if you look at, for instance, the conversation about the Iran deal, I think you see a failure to recognize that lesson. Right.

that reality. My last question about Afghanistan, I do want to get to the Iran deal. In the book you interview an Afghan politician slash warlord slash sociopath named General Abdul Rashid Dostom. You would love that you called him a politician.

That's the nicest thing I said, right? He would find that very moving. Would he cry or does he only weep when animals are present? Only weeps about animals. He's an animal lover. He told me this many times. You have to read the book to hear Ronin's meeting with this man. who first introduced him to his pet reindeer for some reason. He arrived with a reindeer to the interview,

which I really, you know, appreciate. I was hoping Tommy would bring one. He had like an attendant holding on to this giant animal. It's got these very sharp antlers. It's thrashing around and he presents it like Vano White on Wheel of Fortune. And I go, you know, obviously he's got guys with like M4s slung across. their chest behind him, so you'd want to be polite. And he did go the extra mile.

That is putting in some effort for an interview. So I said, you know, that's a lovely animal, general. So you fly to Afghanistan to interview warlord Santa Claus because he has been a U.S. ally when convenient for him and when convenient for us over many years, and has done some truly horrific things during that time. Can you talk about General Dostom, like, what that story of our support?

for warlords like him tells us about U.S. foreign policy and why we seem destined to make the same mistakes over and over again, not just in Afghanistan, but in places around the world. So I think what you see when the diplomats leave the room or are forced out of the room, a la Richard Holbrook, is this pattern over and over again, especially in the years since 9-11, where you have a very different set of alliances that come to the four, because you're basically leaving the CIA and the Pentagon to have free reign and broker things spy to spy and general to general. And I talk about the immediate period after 9-11 as a particularly acute example of that, where there was understandably, to an extent, given circumstances on the ground and the threats to our

national security, no room for diplomacy or talk about long-term strategy. This was how do we went on the ground. And so really before there could be any kind of coherent policy process, you wound up with the CIA and Army Special Forces guys, you know, descending into Afghanistan to find the old uneasy bedfellows that we had worked with during the Cold War and give them guns again. And it was very effective tactically in a lot of ways, and I tell that part of the story, but also at what cost is the question I ask. And I think that when you lose that layer of diplomatic strategy steering a process, you wind up with examples like General Dostum, who over many years off the back of our support became deeply enmeshed in the power

structure we had built in Afghanistan, became the vice president of Afghanistan, an alleged mass grave where he, evidence seemed to suggest, had killed thousands of prisoners that were armed, unarmed and helpless, and dumped them in a hole in the desert and then covered up the evidence later. There were multiple investigations under Bush and then under Obama that were quashed or kept secret. This was a problem that multiple American administrations just wanted to go away because we had this military to militia bond that we really didn't have any power over him within. Yeah.

You have a line in the book that I liked enough to write it down where you're talking about. Here's the line of the book. To suggest diplomacy over force in dealing with the regime that harbored the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks

was akin politically to proposing a national program of cannibalism in public schools. I've not seen a lot of recent polling on cannibalism, but... I feel like in this particular time we're in, maybe it could make it come back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Trump tweets about it

and we're like all into cannibalism now. But your point rung true. Two decades later, nearly two decades later, the politics around peace and around negotiations hasn't gotten easier. Look at the Iran deal, you mentioned it earlier. Trump's own Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, who is known as being very hawkish against Iran,

believes its inner interests. But support for the deal as a partisan issue, Trump wants to get rid of it. How do we fix that? Why are the politics of peace so much harder than the politics of war. Why do politicians have an easier time rallying the country, rallying Congress to invade places than they do to pass an imperfect peace deal, for example? Things going boom is easier to understand, and we have a very deeply entrenched correctly

culture of celebrating the heroism of our war heroes, but not as much of a cultural understanding of what our peacemakers and negotiators do. And one of the things I hope people understand when they read this book, which is told through the lens of the personal stories of these brave men and women who strive year after year with shitty pay in dangerous places to make our world safer and American influence more robust. I hope people see those stories and understand that it's incorrect when people on the campaign trail kind of denigrate them as dusty bureaucrats who don't get anything done. To be sure, the state department, like a lot of government bureaucracies, is out of date and needs reform. And, you know, we've been there before

and successfully reformed it. That happened around and after World War II, and it was very effective that we poured new resources into the State Department and fixed it and cut a lot of the fat and created new offices that adapted to the changing world. that needs to happen again. And instead, we are throwing it out. There is this purge of the department under Trump and this profound misunderstanding you allude to where people don't really get what these guys do. And so we are giving up what they do. And it is critically important. Right. So, I mean, you worked inside the State Department in several roles. You know where it works well or where it does not. And for the book, you interviewed every living Secretary of State,

including Rex Tillerson. Insert joke about Rex Tillerson there. I was struck by a few things about the Tillerson interview. First of all, just how naive he was about the budget process and the basics of how Washington works. I thought he was this competent business guy who might come in and figure stuff out. He did not. Second, how little time it seems like he spent actually doing the job as opposed to fighting with, say, Jared Kushner. One example in the book is, I couldn't believe this. Trump decided to launch strikes on Syria the first time without telling our allies. And the State Department Op Center, which all I've run and explained what that is, got a flood of calls from countries asking what is going on. Instead of answering them, Rex decided to go home for a long

weekend. What did you make of Rex your time with him and his brief but pathetic tenure at the State Department? Not that I have an opinion on the subject. To Rex Tillerson's credit, he gave a fair amount of access and was pretty candid. I mean, I think the most candid we've ever seen him here in this very late in his 10-year interview. And I think he knew at this point that the end was coming, although he was still furiously denying that it was the case. And so there's a bit of an opening of the books here. You know, he does say that he was naive.

You know, he doesn't use that word, and I don't think he would, to give you an example of the kind of personality we're dealing with here, I said, doesn't make you anxious that there are all these ambassadorships that are unfilled and all these jobs across your department that there's no one, in them, things are not getting run because it's an empty building. And he sort of puffed up his chest and said, I don't get anxious.

And I'm like, well, that's one of us. I wish that were true for me. But he, you know, he does admit that he was inexperienced. He said, when I first started defending these 30% cuts to the State Department budget, I was a month or two into the job,

and I didn't really know that when you run a government agency, you're supposed to ask for more money, not less. which every living Secretary of State is on the record in this book, and not one said, yeah, that rings true. That's how you do budget advocacy. Yeah, I mean, you interviewed all these former secretaries of states, these diplomats. Their responses tend to be surprise, surprise, diplomatic. That was not the case when you started asking them about Tillerson's decision to gut the State Department budget.

Why does that worry them more than seemingly anything else he did over there? Well, so for any leader of our diplomatic corps that cared about the people, right, these men and women doing a very brave and important thing, this is a moment of heartbreak. Colin Powell is the example that we've talked about before and that really leaps to mind because he was so candid. And he said, you know, we are ripping the guts out of the State Department. We are mortgaging your future. and for someone like him who I think really believed in that workforce to see them so sidelined and so denigrated and the State Department so empty, the concern is not just the effect that that has now, it's that we have hobbled the foreign service. And when you do that, the flow of talent into it dries up too. So John Kerry talks about this at length.

The problem is not the short term. you can get a next administration that comes in, and as the Obama administration kind of did in the second term, there was a course correction, and they spent a few good years saying, okay, diplomacy matters, and you wind up with the Iran deal for all its controversies. It is a substantive diplomatic accomplishment. You know, the thaw in relations with Cuba, the Paris climate change accord, all of which is under threat now, but that's another matter. The fact is you can spend a few years investing in diplomacy and get large-scale accomplishments.

The problem, though, is you won't have anyone to affect those goals if in 20 years the people who should be becoming ambassadors then just don't exist. And if you look at the numbers, that's what's happening. No one is joining the Foreign Service, let alone the best and the brightest, which is what we need. I think about this a lot, which is the military does big, flashy branding, right? They have flyovers at NFL games, despite the current president's takes on the NFL. Well, CIA, as difficult as the intelligence community jobs are, they end up getting sort of lionized in movies and TVs. They're portrayed as cool and smart and sometimes crazy in homeland. But at least, you know, it's like it seems like an exciting job.

Diplomats, State Department officials are kind of absent from that conversation. What, you don't watch Madam Secretary on CBS? I literally just found out that that show is still on. Incredibly successful show. So, Ronan, you're cool. You're young. Like, how do we make this... Thank you, Tommy. You too. You decided you went to college when you were like eight years old and you graduated and you could have done whatever the hell you wanted. Please, Tommy. I was 11.

And you're 11. And you went to the State Department. Like, why did you do that? How do we get the best and the brightest, as you said, the history of that term, notwithstanding, to go into government? I hope that there is an understanding as we exist in a more and more militarized world that we all suffer. if our first resort is military action. And we all suffer if the entire conversation about solutions to problems is affected by people who only know military solutions. And that's not a knock on our brave servicemen and women. I think effective diplomacy requires military might.

But there is a universe in which these two important tools that the United States has at its disposal counterbalance each other. And all I can say is I hope that the upshot of it getting so bad, of it becoming a real crisis right now, that it will get more and more difficult to pull out of, is that we start realizing we've gone too far and pull out of the nosedive. And Mike Pompeo, I think, despite the track record as it died in the wool hawk, despite the fact that he, by the president's own retelling, has been selected because he's much more lockstep with the president than Rex Tiller, was, hope springs eternal. When you ask any whistleblower in this book, I think they are all praying that he pulls out of the nosedive. Yeah, because you can't teach someone Arabic in a couple months. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Building up capacity is a hard thing. And restoring the integrity

and prestige of a profession is a hard thing. And that requires real leadership. Yeah. Then my final question, then we're going to open up to the audience. So there is this seemingly real diplomatic effort happening right now with North Korea. The recent actions and comments by Kim Jong-un seem unequivocally hopeful. They could be trying to play us. They've done this before, but I think we all want to lean into this. There are probably meetings happening right now with John Bolton, the National Security Advisor, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, Jim Mattis, Secretary of Defense, about what to do. What do you think Richard Holbrook would tell them to do if he were in those meetings right now.

How would he attack this negotiation and get it over the finish line? Well, I'm not going to speak for the ghost of Richard Holbrook. I'm sure he would have some impolitic thing to say probably from a bathroom because I did my job interview with him

in a bathroom while he was taking a shower and I'm on the other side of the door. This is how oblivious he was to other human beings. You should probably tell that story in full. I don't want you to yada yada yada that one. This, I literally, we went from the Secretary of State's office to his office at the State Department to his Georgetown

townhouse and he's lobbying hardball firm policy questions about, you know, Taliban negotiations and the flow of assistance to Afghanistan. And he just goes into the bathroom. I'm, you know, he kind of leaves the door ajar. He pokes his head out and says, I'm going to take a shower and then keeps throwing questions at me. And this was a, you know, his unbridled enthusiasm and obliviousness to other people thing. Hillary Clinton also told a story about how he followed her into a lady's room in Pakistan during a briefing. So, you know, whatever the ghost of Richard Holbrook would say about North Korea, I'm sure it would be in an inappropriate setting and he would alienate someone in the process. But I also think that without speaking for him posthumously, the legacy of what he achieved in Bosnia and what he

tried to achieve in Afghanistan would be apt for the challenges we face in the the Korean Peninsula. So yes, is it possible that this leader-to-leader meeting pays off and is a great thing and nothing but? Sure, it's a complete gamble. And that's the problem. We are flying blind because that meeting is not embedded in any kind of expertise or strategy. So it could pay off, or we could get played terribly, and North Korea could get validated as a nuclear power, which is their fondest ambition. This is one of the wiliest diplomatic opponents in the world. They have lied to us before about these very same points

that they're making sunny promises about now. I profoundly hope that we don't get played. But the way to prevent getting played is to have the infrastructure we had set up around North Korea during the Bush administration when we last tried this, where you have a unit of experts who are steeped in the region and go back and forth all the time and know the pressure,

and know the long-term ramifications when you say something. You know, these are conversations where you deal with coded language that has to be very, very precise, where you have to know what they've deceived us on before, so you're aware of the pitfalls. All of that, every expert I talk to about Korea in this book says, is absent. And we need it now more than ever. Yeah, it would be good to have an ambassador to South Korea. I mean, I'd be nice of Tom Countryman, one of the people who's in the beginning

in the very end of the book, book ends the book, so to speak. was an expert on nonproliferation. It would be nice to have some of those folks in the room. Yeah, it would be better than nice. I think it's essential. And then a guy who flips condos. Get that in the mix. One of the great surprises is that the art of the deal ethos doesn't lead this administration

to value the deal makers. Why are we firing all the deal makers if your whole brand is making deals? That's a good point. John Kerry has a spicy line in this book about how, you know... You don't hear that a lot. What is it? He's like, you know, dictating it to an assistant while windsurfing. Where he says, you know, the art of the deal, you know, he's giving up all the deal makers.

This is a guy who declared bankruptcy X number of times. You know, I guess now we know what. Right, right. When you look at the State Department and the condition it's in. I mean, I took a poke fun at Secretary Kerry, but, I mean, you have an amazing chapter in the book about the frenetic, unrelenting pace of the Iran deal talks. This was not easy. This was seven years of sanctions.

And then, what, 16 days locked in a hotel in Vienna? And Kerry started screaming at the Iranians so loudly that people were hearing him in the lobby. I mean, this was intense stuff. It was intense stuff. I explain, you know, why many of the questions around the Iran deal are very justified. It is, by design, an imperfect deal. And this goes back to a theme we've been talking about. diplomatic accomplishment often looks imperfect.

In the case of Iran, we decided, yeah, it's a rogue state, yeah, they have non-nuclear missile tests going on and that's bad. Yes, there are kidnapped citizens from all around the world there, but none of those issues get better if you also have them as a full-fledged nuclear power. So let's just take that one thing off the table for a while. And as imperfect as it is, by all accounts from our allies, it has done that effectively. and our intelligence community and the Secretary of Defense, who is nominated by Donald Trump. So I hope when people read the story of John Kerry breaking a femur and Wendy Sherman breaking like four bones,

and I'm not really sure why, but they understand how much sweat and blood, literally blood, went into that deal and goes into deals like that and how we need more of that, not less. That's right. Well, Ronan, the book is War on Peace. It is fantastic. Thank you for letting me ask you questions about it. Now I want to turn it over to these folks. I spent about 45 minutes asking running questions, and then we threw the conversation open to the audience for some additional Q&A.

There was one great question that I wanted to play for you guys, which was about how you balance human rights in foreign policy decision making, given all the equities at stake for the United States government. It was a good question. I thought Ron, give a great answer. So I wanted to include that here. So here it is. Well, I'm glad you asked about that because I think one of the most acute costs of what I talk

about in war on peace is that human rights concerns. go out of the window. And yes, there are people at the Pentagon who care deeply about human rights, but really the main bastion of counterbalance on that issue saying, hey, wait a minute, we should have a concern here, and it should maybe put a pause on our relationship with Warlord X. That's, that Warlord X is not an actual guy I interviewed for the book. I realize it sounds like it. That should be part of the diplomatic conversation. And our ability to have negotiators in the mix who craft a long-term strategy enhances our ability to raise human rights concerns.

And certainly in practice, it seems that when you let everything get run through the CIA and the Pentagon, you lose the arguments about human rights. And it becomes purely about expedience on the battlefield. and I tell that story in Afghanistan and in Somalia and in a bunch of other places that I looked at and went to for this book. And it's really quite chilling. And it really is a problem. I mean, this falls again into the distinction between tactics and strategy.

It can be fine from a tactical standpoint if you're just looking at battlefield gains to completely ignore human rights for a while. But very often what you find in these books, places is that ignoring human rights comes back to bite us because of the ways in which it alienates people because of the ways in which it empowers dangerous guys that we should have known we're dangerous from the beginning and because of the way in which that all becomes entrenched if you don't have a diplomat there saying, hey, I'm with the Office of Human Rights. Stop someone.

Yeah, I mean, I think Ronan does a really great job in the book of talking about how complicated this is. For example, our relationship with Pakistan is enormous and, in the, and, in the There's a lot of equities there in terms of al-Qaeda and other extremist groups, and there's a lot of military-to-military ties. But their military has also been known to conduct extrajudicial killings, murder journalists, murder human rights activists. And there's a provision in our law that says we cannot fund those units. And so there's a lot of looking the other way and whitewashing of these issues,

but at the same time, if you really lean on the Pakistanis over EJK, extrajudicial killings, you know, you might end up cutting off relations and not focusing enough on their nuclear weapons. So it's going to be complicated in North Korea. I think the Iran deal is an example of where you can carve off one really important issue, nuclear weapons, and make the negotiation about that. And that's probably what they will do here. But that doesn't mean you have to say Kim Jong-un is a really compelling, wonderful guy

when you know he has a concentration camp full of 100,000 people who are being killed. Yeah, and you look at the way this administration talks about strong men and dictators, and you really feel the absence of experts talking about human rights in any way that filters into the Oval Office. Thank you. On that, that's your full note. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you all for being here. Appreciate it. Buy the book. Thank you guys again for tuning in. Thank you, Ronan, for sitting down with me and doing a fun event. Check out the book, War on Peace, the End of Diplomacy, and the Decline of American Influence. Get it on Amazon.

dot com or wherever books are sold it's worth it it's a good narrative you'll enjoy it see you guys next week