 And it is a pleasure to see all of you here for this afternoon's policy talks, which is going to focus on network diplomacy. We're looking forward to having our discussion with all of you here this afternoon. Well, today's speaker, Ambassador Richard Boucher, is here teaching at the Ford School, and so it's a particular pleasure to be able to welcome him here. As many of you know, he is one of our Towsley policymakers and residents, and let me tell you just a little bit about the Towsley program before I introduce him formally. The Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation Policymaker and Residence Program was first established in 2002, and the goal has always been to bring distinguished policy leaders to the Ford School, to engage with our community, to teach students, to share their insights and their perspective with the broader community in a variety of different ways. And we've been delighted and very pleased about the opportunities that that program has afforded us. We're particularly pleased to have Richard with us, and he has joined us this semester, and I know that his wife, Caroline, who is with us here today, was instrumental in his spending this semester in Ann Arbor, and so we're not only very pleased to have her here with us today, but we're also pleased that she was supportive of him in making that decision. So we're particularly grateful for all of that. Richard Boucher's topic today addresses issues of network diplomacy in U.S. foreign affairs, and with the rise of the social media in the 21st century, it seems like the actions of all of the governments around the world are subject to a very different level of public opinion, and that has implications in a variety of different dimensions. Well, Richard Boucher is no stranger to addressing global public opinion of America's foreign affairs. In fact, he was the longest serving assistant secretary of state for public affairs, and in this capacity he was either spokesman or deputy spokesman for five secretaries of state. In particular, Lauren Siegelberger, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice. In 2006, he was appointed assistant secretary of states for South and Central Asian affairs, and served until his retirement from the Foreign Service in 2009. Among his many diplomatic posts, he served as ambassador to Cyprus, consul general in Hong Kong. He led the U.S. efforts for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, APEC. He's fluent in Chinese. Richard has contributed to developing U.S.-China relations throughout his foreign service career, and then after decades of representing American interests and negotiating with foreign governments, he accepted a top-level assignment with the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, and as deputy secretary general at the OECD found himself negotiating with Americans and representing global interests, and that's an interesting kind of shift in perspective that I suspect we may benefit from today as we hear his remarks. So clearly he brings both breadth and depth of diplomatic perspective to our community and to our conversation this afternoon, and so it is really a pleasure to welcome him here to Michigan and the Ford School. So before we start, I'd like to remind our audience that if you have questions, there are cards that you can write them on, and there will be members of the Ford School staff who will be coming down the aisles to collect the cards at about 4.30 with help from Professor Marina Whitman and two of the Ford School students, Kiana Shelton and Stephen Paparot. We will be reading your questions to Richard during the Q&A session. So if you are watching us online, I encourage you to submit your questions via Twitter and please use the hashtag policy talks. So with that, Richard, I'm delighted to welcome you to the podium and the floor is yours. Thank you very much. That's a better introduction to my CV. I think I'm going to rewrite it or steal it. Good afternoon, everybody. First I want to thank everybody for coming. I want to thank the Towsley Foundation for sponsoring me here at Michigan. Thank Dean Susan Collins for welcoming me, Professor Alan Deirdor, for showing me the ways of the world, and Cliff Martin for everything that he's done to help get me settled and organized and introduced me to Michigan. So thank you all for the warm welcome here at Michigan and thanks for giving me a chance to talk. Before I start, I'm told it might be appropriate to give us all a brief moment of silence to contemplate the basketball scores from the weekend. So now that that's over, we'll start discussing policy again. I want to talk today about what I've done all my life, not just to tell some stories but also to talk about diplomacy and how it's changing in the world and how we're changing into a world that's formed of nodes and networks rather than just powers and blocks. I'll talk from the perspective of the United States because that's what I know, but I think every country is going to have to face this and master doing diplomacy in a new world. I'll give the overview and then after I finish, maybe 25 minutes from now, we can go and talk about anything you want. Diplomacy has always been about winning friends and influencing people. 200 years ago, Ben Franklin went to Paris, put on a Coonskin cap, changed the image for himself and his new nation and managed to get French support for our revolution. Not any significant support until after we'd won a few battles and demonstrated our strength. Power still underpins diplomacy, but as power itself is evolving and how we exercise power is changing too. Moises Naim talks about now the decay of power, the dispersion of power, the scattering of power of all kinds of governments, of corporations, of civil society groups, of religions even. The United States still stands at the top by most measures, but we're not alone anymore and we find that there are more powers, more players, and more blockers than we've gotten used to over the past few decades. In fact, we have what it takes and just about every area of power and influence, we remain either the biggest or the best. We have more aircraft carriers, more cyber capabilities, bigger national income, innovation, economy, global brands, TVs and movies, net imports, capital flows, reserve currencies, even top rated schools with top rated basketball and football teams. Just about everything but soccer. We can use these tools and hopefully we can use them effectively. So when you get to something like Ukraine, there is a classic confrontation going on involving alliances and gunboats and money on the table and gas and economic levers, visa bans, status propaganda and every other traditional element of power and diplomacy. But we all have the feeling now that the outcomes are less clear cut, the effects are more indirect and our ability to wield traditional power has diminished. So in some the US can still lead but getting the people to follow has gotten more complicated than it has been since say about 1990. So I'd like to talk to you today about how traditional power has changed, about how we can rebuild trust in our leadership, about how we can project ourselves differently into the world and then try to come back to Ukraine and try to pull a lot of it together. We no longer live in a world of blocks of packs, we live in a world of nodes and connections. In our world everyone's connected, countries with teenagers, NGOs with corporations, students with universities or terrorist groups. Traditional measures of power don't capture the changed nature and the weaknesses of power diplomacy on a network. Military power for example still uses ships and planes and soldiers but also drones and computer viruses which cost less and go much farther with less risk. So we're facing adversaries often not even nations and states, adversaries who can threaten us with smaller investments and less accountability. Cyber war and war by remote control are new, they don't have rules. When do you use them? Who do you retaliate against? If the actors are not clear and not from governments who do you hold accountable? We ourselves rely on new technology more than almost any state so at the same time as we're powerful we're also vulnerable. We have to think again about how we use these new capabilities. On the economic side, economic power these days relies not just on the size of GDP or of trade balances. Goods are produced in global value chains. People who create the products and services and those who organize the value chains have the power to make the decisions and the money about how the product is produced and where the product is produced. For the moment US brands constitute about 55 out of 100 of the world's leading global brands and in these value chains more value comes from the intangibles the design and the marketing rather than the skill, the manufacturing and assembly. Skills, business organization and services add the most value along the chain and this trend is probably going to strengthen as robotic manufacturing becomes more widespread, more sophisticated and as things like 3D printing expands where there's almost no manufacturing until it gets to your kitchen. So the United States is riding high but we have to pay attention. If value added provides the key to growth productivity and especially to wage growth we have to think again about how we develop skills, how we innovate, about global rules, about taxation, global standards and practices, about just about everything. We also have to ensure that value chains spread respect for workers in the environment as well as for the norms of anti bribery, corporate governance and responsibility. Straight up military and economic power is less effective without the trust of others. In fact trust is what turns power into influence. Economics as you all know here in Michigan because you've been doing an economic confidence survey for 60 some years, economics is a confidence gain. Why don't people invest when interest rates are 2% because they don't have any confidence in the consumers of the future. But politics and diplomacy rely on confidence too. Leaders aren't leaders if no one trusts them enough to follow. And if people trust you they work with you and they involve themselves in your business. Now people around the world have always looked up to and respected the United States particularly the success of our economy and of our democracy. Other nations over time have placed confidence in our leadership. We still get this respect on an individual level and as a society the fact that we're still the top destination for immigrants shows that. But we have a long way to go to repair our image and our brand as a nation. We have a credibility gap. Credibility gap comes from politics from economics and above all from the Iraq war. Start with politics and economics. First and foremost credibility begins at home. We have to work harder on the success of our democracy of our economy of our society. As a U.S. diplomat I used to be able to tell people that yes we have our problems we have our crises. But we face up to them and we fix them. It's a little harder to say these days. The paralysis in Washington sort of undercuts that theory and all I can do is hope that it won't be permanent. We also see economic competitors now. Even competitors when it comes to the economic model. Financial crisis wiped out what was known as the Washington consensus. Even if much of what it embodied remains valid economics. Can we forge a new consensus? A free market path that producing prosperity and reducing inequalities. If we do governments will emulate us and forge compatible practices. If not they're going to look elsewhere. And I for one certainly hope the new commences consensus will emerge as a free market consensus and not a bureaucratic Beijing consensus or even a Brussels consensus. The other component of power that I've worked with is information. Now more than ever information drives the new economy and the new politics and diplomacy. Information started revolutions in the Arab world. It keeps Chinese politics bubbling. It holds governments accountable. Nothing stays secret anymore. We know that from Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. But even in China the government can't repress the social media so the party tries instead to get involved to manage the online conversation and manipulate it. They end up having to fire officials who get exposed on social media for failing to fix problems or for wearing designer watches. When it comes to information credibility is paramount and institutions around the world are facing a decline in credibility and a rise in accountability. Overall that's good but it hasn't been good for our reputation. Confidence in information from the United States public and private sources has been in long term decline from Vietnam through Watergate to the Iraq war. And we need to rebuild our information reputation. American credibility took an enormous hit with Iraq and since I was part of that I want to talk about it a little bit. Our February 5 presentation to the United Nations turned out to be Swiss cheese. As Robert McNamara said in a different context we were wrong terribly wrong and we owe it to future generations to explain why. So let me join the discussion. I want to start out with a flat statement. We did not lie. We made a series of terrible errors. First Saddam had had weapons and we assumed he still had them. We identified certain configurations of trucks that had moved chemical weapons in the past and every time we saw those configurations of trucks we counted with chemical weapons even if we couldn't see the bombs. We committed the error of extrapolating. Second Iraqi officials were lying to themselves. We heard them talking about special weapons and special movements. We committed the error of credulity. Third we thought he had weapons of mass destruction so we found what we were looking for. We committed the error of confirmation bias. And fourth we said if Saddam has no weapons why doesn't he prove it? What's he hiding? In the end I think he was hiding his nakedness from his neighbors. He didn't think we were going to attack and therefore he didn't bother taking steps to stop us. We committed the error of believing that others act and think the way we would. We committed the error of thinking it was about us. Something that I call methropomorphism. So this series of errors led to a tragic blunder. In consequence the world now finds it's unreliable and will not easily follow us again. Now perhaps that's for the better. Maybe more questions will be asked next time we go off. But rebuilding our credibility is not going to be easy. We can't go back to the UN the way Adlai Stevenson did in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Notice I'm talking about information, not propaganda. We need to play it straight, not build a new propaganda machine. Most of the world has learned not to trust information from governments, not ours, not theirs. And all that tweeting and blogging from the State Department and the White House that my friends are all doing now, it really doesn't amount to much. It's not worth five minutes of information on Facebook that's produced by the people and for the people. But the most fundamental error in Iraq was not just intelligence or information or the number of troops or the botched occupation. It was really the error of hubris, the belief that we could fix things for everybody else. But as power becomes more diffuse, as people get more tools and governments, as we make things together with others instead of by ourselves, we need to shift our ideas about our role in the world. The United States has to stop trying to be Mr. Fixit, start using our diplomacy to empower other people to fix their own problems. Fundamental goals have not changed. We still believe we do best in a world of free societies and free markets and free peoples. In a networked world, we can provide the connections and the tools that those societies, markets, and peoples need. In a networked world, there are viruses, not existential threats to the United States. And we all benefit from the rise of new nodes. Finally, we shouldn't think governments should do everything. Extending platforms for business, education, and individuals empowers the kind of change we want. But it's the educators, the business people, and the individuals who actually make the change. There are more and more people that want to do this. The world's middle class is exploding. And in fact, the world's middle class is revolting. These consumers have market power. They increasingly want political power. Many of the revolutions around the world are middle class revolutions. They don't need us to solve their problems. They're taking matters into their own hands. We need to speak to them and their needs for access, for education, for opportunity. And I have to say, I think our best diplomacy is diplomacy where we put the tools in other people's hands. And I'm going to hold up my one example that I love to cite. The Beijing Air Quality Index. The people in my class have seen this like a dozen times. Beijing Air Quality Index. You can get it on your portable phone. The U.S. embassies started monitoring the air quality in Beijing and put a sensor on their roof and put up the index for their staff. And then the Chinese found out about it and Chinese citizens started using it to figure out what the weather was, what the smog alert level was in Beijing. This then produced pressure on the Chinese government to do something about the smog. So right now it's 227 particles per million of particulate matter in Beijing. And you can get Guangzhou and Shanghai and other places too. And what we've done is basically given Chinese citizens the tools that they need, the spark that they need to pressure their government into doing something about it. And so you'll see on the application, it's not just the U.S. embassies index, but the Chinese had to set up their own monitoring service so the Chinese citizens would actually trust their government when it came to defining the smog levels. So how do we provide more people with their own platforms for change? Their own opportunities that they can use for themselves. Let me talk about five different areas. I think first and foremost we provide platforms for expression. So a lot of Cypriots told me that first thing they knew about the world, first thing they knew about the United States was when the U.S. Information Agency would drive a pickup truck up to the village and they'd hear the sound of the generator and a projector would go on and start showing these movies on the white walls of the villages. And the movies were these huge combines going harvesting wheat from here to the sky. Had nothing to do with terrorist olive farmers in the middle of Cyprus mountains. But it showed them there was a big world out there. It showed them there was something different. And that's how they started to get interested in things like foreign policy and U.S. education. Some Indian leaders told me that they used to go to the USA, U.S. libraries in Delhi. And I said, oh that's great. Were you interested in the United States at a young age? I said no, no. It was the only place a student could go to get air conditioned. But while I was there I read the magazines and I read the literature on the education system and I decided I wanted to go to university in the U.S. We can still do that for people. We don't need to do air conditioned libraries anymore. We can do internet access. I've seen it work. We show the kids the world in Turkmenistan, American Corners. Where you go into an old concrete building that's falling apart. You open the door and there's posters and internet terminals and kids and people looking at all this information and air conditioning as well. Where they can see what's out there beyond their confines. So you see it every day with Peace Corps volunteers all over the world who do it on a personal basis. That's something we can do. And American private firms do it too. They provide this access on Facebook and Google and Instagram and all the other different tools. Said Boizezi, the Tunisian fruit seller who burned himself, emulated himself. He would have died anonymously if it wasn't for cell phones and Facebook. But his sacrifice fed far and wide on the electronic platforms. It created revolutions. And in Tehran, is that me? Maybe not. In Tehran they were chanting first Ben Ali in Tunisia, then Mubarak of Egypt. Now it's time for Sayyad Ali, how many in Iran? You see spread like wildfire because of these platforms, because of these networks. However, if the U.S. is to become the trusted platform, we're going to have to provide secure internet access with an abundance of information and variety of views. Forgo the desire to listen and probe everything that appears on the internet. We're suspect because of all the NSA snooping. Everyone thinks we know everything and listen to everything. The Brazilians and the Germans now want to localize their internet. And that would create major obstacles for all of us who want to truly open worldwide web. So if we want people to trust us and use our technology, we need to provide the platforms and the tools for incredibly secure internet. Reliable tools for authentication, encryption, privacy and security. Protections modeled on the Seattle Seahawks who showed us all the defense beats offense. Second, we can provide the platforms for personal advancement. Kids in Nepal can now study at MIT. Kids all over the world can use the Khan Academy to get ahead. That empowers both us and them. With our outreach and our foreign assistance, we can promote programs like one laptop per child or distant learning or remote health services. Third, areas we can provide people around the world with platforms to build their own prosperity. Access to the value chains that provides jobs and development. The transfer technology and standards bring in suppliers and entrepreneurs. And if it's done right, give every country a chance to become part of global commerce. For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development is now cooperating with companies to develop small enterprises in Southeast Asia. We can work with other governments, with companies and groups on simple and adaptable standards that others can use. Things like a single electronic customs form that would lower cost, reduce delays and reduce bribery as goods move across the borders. Something like the Common App for universities. Skills are what add value and we can help develop portable certifications so that people without university degrees can bring skills, can get certified for their skills and take them where they need them. We can spread technologies by passing more open intellectual property and patent laws so that people can use and build on prior inventions without denying a return to those who developed them. Fourth, we can provide better government. Electronic governance is generally less corrupt, makes government more accountable and it's cleaner than what many people have now, including many of us. And finally, we can provide welcoming platforms to work out the new rules for a new system and a new economy. Since the back room trade deals in Seattle and Cancun broke down more than a decade ago, and more and more I think every day, the Gs are artificial, the G7, the G8, the G20 even, or the P5 or the 15 and the 193 at the United Nations. Regional bilateral agreements are now opening up trade even though global negotiations have stalled if not died. Foreign policy is becoming more and more a pick up basketball game. Certain stalwarts play every Saturday, no matter what. Others show up depending on the game and the weather. They're going to have a lot more of that kind of diplomacy. We need to open up and welcome all the interested players who want to show up for the game. All right, so how does all this come together in an instant like Ukraine, where brick bats and information platforms, economic persuasion and Peace Corps volunteers all make a difference? In a world of hard knocks like Ukraine, what good are ideas about platforms and empowerment? You might say, don't be naive. Well, in many ways our response is classic. Sanctions, alliances, military deployments bashing with sticks and throwing mud. Something diplomats are good at. We're not going to reverse Putin in the short term. We may stop him, but we need to turn his tactical advantage into a strategic setback. And to do that, we need to empower others. We need to think again about how to empower Ukrainians, extend European association and other reform programs, perhaps more visible intelligence sharing, perhaps even crowdsourced reporting on tank movements or using cell tower data to track concentrations of Moscow's cell phones. Isn't there an app for that? We need to think about how to empower Russia's neighbors by supporting the Central Asians and expediting membership in the World Trade Organization for Kazakhstan, which has a significant Russian speaking population, which they would like to protect themselves, but the Russians come in and do it. We need to consult with China because China believes you can't hack off pieces of a country like Tibet or Inner Mongolia. And we need to provide visible NATO support for our allies in Turkey and the Baltics in Poland. We also need to think about how to empower Europeans and wean them from reliance on Russia, promoting US gas exports and building LNG terminals or encouraging fracking in Poland and other European countries. We might even think about getting the British to nationalize the Chelsea Football Club and taking over the New Jersey, the Brooklyn, sorry, Nets ourselves. We might do all these things anyway, playing power politics from the past, but we need to react in a strategic way, not just bash Russia with sticks. We can establish a platform for the long-term orientation of Russia's neighbors with the West and we need to keep that strategic goal front and center. In fact, it's strategic because, unfortunately, Vladimir Putin's Empire Envy is going to be with us for some time to come. In any case, the new agenda for diplomacy still involves negotiation and power projection, but also more domestic innovation, information platforms and furnishing people in societies with new opportunity. What we do for some people around the world will determine whether they trust us and whether they share interests with us. In the network world, our influence comes not just from the tools of raw power, but from our ability to empower other people with platforms for their own success. We can't fix everything, but we can enable a lot of others to fix their own problems. And in a modern networked world, that in itself constitutes a powerful platform. So thank you very much and now I'll be happy to take your questions about this or anything else. Well, we're so excited to have you today. My name is Kiana Sheldon and we have a few questions. I'm also here today with the fabulous Stephen Paparo, first-year MPP and thanks again for the Ford School for putting this together and thanks again, Richard, for teaching two excellent courses this semester here at the Ford School. I'm a little bit biased. I'm in one right now. Everyone in the room is extremely jealous. It's great. So we have some questions for you from our audience today and we'll start with this one. Why does the U.S. continue to seek to be on top economically, socially, and politically? Yeah, it's a good question. I think, first of all, the world needs some kind of leadership and we believe in ourselves, others historically generally have believed in us and we think that we're a power for good. We're a power for change and that we can certainly do better. But I think as far as most Americans, we believe we can do better in a world where we exercise leadership. It takes a certain level of understanding of others, but I do think we have something to offer and we should not shrink from the task. You described a series of errors in the run-up to the war in Iraq. When you said we made mistakes specifically, were we referring to the State Department? What were your thoughts about Rumsfeld, the intelligence community, the vice president, and others in the Bush administration? Did they make mistakes or are they lying? I think they made mistakes. I wouldn't say they lied. I think they had an ideological agenda, some of them more than others, and they found the evidence to prove their agenda. I think they had an ideological agenda and did not face up to the reality of the situation, but they decided Iran was a rock. They decided Iran was a strategic problem. They just didn't get around to it. They decided Iraq was a strategic problem and that they had to do something about it and so they marshaled sets of information and facts in order to create the case for going to do it. The fundamental error of hubris of believing that it was up to us that we could do this that nobody else could, that we had to do it, I think that's where it lay. Diplomacy can often be slow and time-consuming. When should the U.S. use force in defense of women's, of human rights abroad? I think it always has to be the last resort. Force always has to be the last resort and yes diplomacy can be messy, time-consuming and often very unproductive, but with every situation we face you can't say well we're going to send military forces to take care of it. I don't think any of the mothers or fathers in this room would think that we should readily send boys and girls off to die and that's what happens when you use military force. Sometimes it works out nicely and you don't have to worry but every time you send military into combat you're threatening people's lives on both sides. So as unfortunate as that is it means human rights problems. We're going to have to try to fix them in other ways because I think there are very few situations like that around the world where we in fact do believe we should send American forces. Now the alternative is not always American force sometimes if you can negotiate a deal you can get peacekeeping troops in we've done that again and again in the end in Darfur we got the African peacekeepers in there to stop the violence but you just can't use military force all the time as the answer. Why does the U.S. think it has any business inserting itself into the Ukrainian issue? I think because it's a challenge to a kind of world we and many many others would like to see that trying to build a world that's more open that trades that changes people and ideas that shares prosperity and we're not trying to redraw a line across Europe whereas I think Putin is thinking about it in very old ways. He wants to draw a line and say this is mine and that's yours and I think we have to resist that because if you start doing that and others start to do it too and you end up with a world that gets divided back into blocks and a new Cold War. I think we have to handle this crisis in a way that doesn't allow him to do that which means we don't respond in a truly reciprocal manner so we don't draw a line and say okay this is ours and that's yours. There's been talk about technology being the next step for diplomacy and talk about the return to human-centered approaches like the Peace Corps. Are these methods competing for resources or does one enhance the other? I think they're both absolutely necessary. I mean the talk of using technology to replace diplomacy has been around for a long time. Those of us who remember Ross Perot remember that he said we could replace the State Department with a fax machine. I won't explain what a fax machine is as you can google it. But when we had something to tell another government we just slap it on the fax machine and we tell them and that's really it doesn't work that way. I mean nothing works that way. It's still about people and it's still about that last two feet of meeting people and talking to them and understanding them and trying to deal with them. And as much diplomacy as we conduct these days by email or by telephone it's all based on personal relationships that are that are begun face to face and that are continue to maintain face to face. Now those relationships are not just American diplomats with badges and signs or American ambassadors. They're Peace Corps volunteers. They're journalists. They're American travelers. They're American business people. They're NGOs. They're people out traveling the world to save pandas and people out traveling the world to create exchanges. They're people at universities in the United States who welcome foreign students. So I don't think we're ever going to get beyond the fact that well I like to say that there's the first rule of diplomacy comes from the Muppets movie which is where Nick the Greek says peoples is peoples. And in the end that's what it's all about. It's about peoples and you've got to deal with people as individuals as as regular human beings and once you start doing that you start to understand what they want what you want and maybe how you can both get what you want together. Of the many administrations you've worked for which one was the most sympathetic to the State Department or diplomacy and conversely in general which of the administrations you worked for was the least sympathetic? Wow. You know for 30 years I wouldn't answer a question like that. It really is funny. I used to quote we had a friend of the family and we went to like the third bar mitzvah in a week when when my friends were all turning 13 and I said you know food was better last week wasn't it? He turned to me and said don't compare just enjoy. So I said you know secretaries of state are like a filter fish you know they don't compare just enjoy and I did that for a long time but I think it's time now maybe to compare a little bit. You had sort of everybody the State Department depends on the personality the present personality of the Secretary of State. So you had people like George Schultz who was a professor experienced very smart and you had this feeling like he was really sort of working the the paper process the intellectual machine you know when Schultz you'd get little comments in the margins of your memos back and you felt like you and he had this relationship you were writing your papers and he was creating them sometimes not always positively and Madeline Albright was a bit that way too she was a bit professorial as well that was her background. Now Connie Rice was a professor but every time you went to see her it was like going for your graduate exams where you felt like he just didn't know enough and she had more insightful and piercing questions than you were prepared to answer but you kept trying because that's what you do. I think George Schultz Colin Powell believed in the institution Colin Powell remade the State Department institutionally he brought the internet onto our desks before he arrived this is year 2001 we had classified computers on our desks but the system was really bad and really slow so you'd send a cable to somebody you know in Brussels saying you know we need you tomorrow to go in and talk to the Europeans about pasta and then you go home at night and get on your computer and you send them an email saying I sent you a cable saying we need to go talk to the Europeans about pasta it wasn't a very secure system because you were doing so much on your home computer. Powell brought the internet into our offices so we could actually look things up so we could actually communicate with the rest of the world not just diplomats who had classified I think Powell more than anybody cared about State Department and how it operated and how as an institution of American diplomacy it could work people say that James Baker was probably the most hostile he was probably the least integrated although I worked for him and his team and I felt like I was part of that sometimes more a part of his team than I was the rest of the building but he had one guy had a guy named Bob Kimmet who later became our ambassador in Germany and he was kind of a linchpin so Baker and his crowd would get together in the morning this is particularly true during the Iraq war first Iraq war and they would decide that that we needed to do things and then Kimmet would have his meeting with like 60 people in his office and he'd say okay the Intel boys you got to call the CIA you got to get in touch with the Saudis you know and do this the econ people we need some numbers on you know oil flows and prices and we need you to watch these markets and you know you the press guy you go to this and that's what Kimmet could do you could translate the sort of Baker isolation into instructions that the rest of us could carry out so each one had a different style I at one point thought it sort of people rose to the moment that they were you know the part of history that they had to manage but I don't think that's true I think it's just personal style but it was probably you felt more reward and more fun working for Colin Powell than anybody else no longer answer this first time I've answered the question so I'll get better at it how do you envision the U.S.-China relationship in the next 50 years oh messy very messy must have been the early 1980s John K Fairbanks is like the foremost scholar of China and U.S.-China relations came to the State Department gave a speech and he said the biggest problem in U.S.-China relations and the time that he could foresee was going to be human rights and all of us on the China desk came back just shaking our heads thinking this guy's you know he's getting old he's truly you know starting to lose it and of course this was like five or six years before Tiananmen and the human rights problems that have been with us continued with us and which we failed to solve ever since and I sometimes think that back to that because if we'd taken it more seriously if we'd set out at that time to solve human rights problems we might have done some good we might not have prevented Tiananmen Square but for example the education through labor system which they just announced the end to about two years ago we had a shot at getting rid of that in the 80s if we'd really focused on that and said you need to put that in more judicial setting and not let party officials send people off for reeducation you know so all that's a prelude to saying I don't know but I'll predict anyway I think China is facing some really tough times in the next few years I think they're coming to the end of an economic model they're investing more and getting less out of it they're bumping into you might call the democratic constraints on development that if you want to have a creative economy if you want to have an innovative economy you need to give people the freedom to create and innovate they need to have fair information they need to have fair regulation there needs to be accountability of officials so on the one hand they're facing the end of the model on the other hand they're facing the threat of housing bubbles popping and banking crises and things like that so I think there's going to be a lot of turmoil in China and there's going to be a tendency on the part of some Chinese to look outside of their borders to create nationalist fervor to start trying to deal with Taiwan to start trying to take little islands from the Japanese that kind of stuff so I think we're not only going to face sort of economic turmoil in the relationship but we are going to face some of these security questions as well and that's that's going to be kind of tough I don't think China is has visions of grandeur I don't think China is trying to become a power that protects the world or to displace the United States from the the world scene but I do think they want to control traditionally Chinese areas and traditionally Chinese seas and especially they want to control their access to Taiwan so that we can't protect Taiwan and that's where we and they rub up in friction and I think unfortunately as China goes through internal turmoil there may be a tendency to exacerbate that do you believe in the current diplomatic military shift towards Asia the pivot will come to fruition or will issues elsewhere like the Middle East the Ukraine prevent it from happening do we really get to set the agenda or do other factors drive it well I no I don't believe in the pivot I believe you got to keep your eyes everywhere all the time I think there's too many lessons that the place you're not paying attention to is the place you have problems whether you're in management in a corporation or whether you're running the world we're trying to we're trying not to that if you if you don't you know pay attention to Ukraine that's where you're going to have problems if you stop watching out for Singapore and Vietnam that's where you're going to have problems if you go away from Afghanistan for 10 years and let them fight out their civil war it's going to come back to bite you and so unfortunately for the United States and our friends working with friends we ought to be paying attention to everything we ought to have sufficient capability in Asia and sufficient capability in Europe as well as Africa and Latin America so that we can deal with a lot of different things at once in a world of network diplomacy with more interested and informed players will it be essential for the US to be willing to follow more often in order to generate trust for others to be willing to follow our leadership when should the US be a follower yeah I think that's a very good question I think it's it's basically the answer is there that there are cases where we can be a follower I don't think we can take ourselves completely out of the action but with Libya when the revolution started theirs our cozy for whatever reason wanted the French to be in the lead and we supported with NATO I don't think we have to do everything and certainly I think we can extend capabilities to others like the aircraft monitoring systems that we provided for Libya for French operations in Libya or some of the other platforms that we provided to other allies that went in with intelligence agents and things like that so I think there's things that we can do you know in second tier and third tier things in many cases and this is it's good to have a world where different people are in the lead so that comes back to that we don't have to fix everything we don't have to lead everything but we are going to probably get involved in a lot more things than we might instinctively like to this is a three part question throughout your diplomatic career which diplomatic efforts have most impressed you what are you most proud of and which did you find to be the most frustrating I love three part questions because you get to remember two of them and skip one was the first part the ones that most impressed me those who were in my class first half of the semester know that I the period of the the Baker administration the fall of Berlin Wall Tiananmen in China and of the Soviet Union how we got through that peacefully is still really something of a a mystery to scholars and historians the fact that we were able to manage all that and get a new round of Middle East peace talks starting is probably the thing that most impressed me and that a lot of that has to do with Baker and George Bush George HW Bush the president that they were working it they were working it personally throughout most frustrating while the whole Iraq war most frustrating because not because I knew at the time it was a stupid thing to do I can't quite go that far but I did think at the time that we could have supported the inspectors we could have used the inspectors to disarm Iraq and not have to go in with military force and the fact that we couldn't do that we couldn't hold back Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president people like that from from using force I would say prematurely another couple months I think we might have actually gotten the UN to take care of the weapons of mass destruction problem or at least prove they didn't have any but anyway I mean the other frustrating thing frankly was Bosnia was the Balkans right about the same time as we were picked you know as we were taking care of the Soviet Union and everything else we had the Balkan wars and there were just horrible things going on everywhere that we were not in a position to stop we didn't think we were in a position to stop let's put it that way and it was very frustrating I was spokesman at the time and most days I went out and people would say there's a Holocaust happening why aren't you stopping it I didn't have very good answers should we have asked for more from China and Russia to join the WTO in 19 now early in my career I was on the east west trade the office of east west trade and I wrote a paper on what we should ask for for China to join the general agreements on terrorist trade the predecessor of the WTO and I wrote a 95 page memo I mean unheard of in the State Department with all the analysis of the conditions and what Romanian Bulgaria had been forced to agree to and all that stuff on China's membership and I sent it upstairs to Bob Hormat some of you may know him he came back in various incarnations and it came back downstairs with a note on it that said I will not sign anything I do not understand and I don't have time to try to figure this out and so I had to wait till he was on a trip and his deputy who was quite willing to be the smarter red faster or whatever but he was going to sign but anyway the note on the front is something I've kept in my mind my whole life and I don't think I've ever signed anything I don't understand or that I didn't have time to figure out no I think the answers clearly know that those 95 pages had way too many conditions and by the time we got China into the WTO it was time and the reason is that the conditionality is a lever for change so you want to focus it on the things that give you the biggest multiplier not a whole codicell of thousands of rules and regulations and product standards and you know quota requirements you want to focus on the levers that actually produce real change in China and if you look at China since they joined the WTO that really has changed a lot of the ways of doing business in China a lot of the ways that corporations react a lot of the ways that corporations behave in the world it's not the only tool we had and we shouldn't pretend pretend that it was but it it really was a very powerful lever and I think that's been for the good of all of us this question comes from a student from China I come from China I feel even though China's economy has risen people's thinking has still been traditional and old you think it will change over time what can we do as international students thanks and people's thinking in China or outside of China in China one of our one of our Chinese friends is a trade guy that used to work for the commercial section at the embassy in Washington when China joined the WTO he was on these teams he used to travel all over China and go talk to local enterprises to provincial officials and tell them about the WTO and what it required and how it's going to have to look at how to behave to you know how how to operate differently I think he wasn't as successful as we all might hope he had been I think that's the problem of entering coming to the end of the economic model and that what has to happen is it's not that people have to change you can't educate people to behave in a way that the system doesn't encourage them to behave right now the system encourages them to borrow cheap money from the bank not pay it back invest in whatever they want and create more products to export that's what the exchange rates do that's what the interest rates do that's what the way party cadre or looked at and promoted it's what the statistical system does it encourages people just to do more of that and if you're having a slowdown you just throw more money at it you put some more cotton candy into the kid's mouth and he keeps going like this for a while long but they're running on fumes now and that model is not going to take them forward into a new economy and into the rebalanced economy what they've been doing is investing more and getting left out less out of it they're investing more than 50 percent of their GDP right now because money is cheap so what the party tried to do what the new leaders tried to do at the last plenum in october november was to start fiddling not with a big economic model things they're not ready to take that on because it's just too political to change the sort of orientation of china's economy you've got to go after the big state enterprises the big banks the export industries and the provincial coastal provinces where a lot of the export growth has come from those are the people who just elected the new leadership it's like turning on your constituency and your voters they can't do that politically but what they're trying to do is they they freed up the exchange rate and let the exchange rate become more uh realistic shall we say which means there's no more a bigger premium on exports than there is on imports consumers can afford to buy a little more and you won't get quite as much or you don't make quite as much on exports they're freeing up exchange interest rates as well so that state enterprises can no longer buy borrow terribly cheap money and invest it any way they want even unproductively they're starting to introduce a bit of market discipline for chinese companies even state enterprises so that they're going to be more accountable for profit making and for returning some of the loans for bringing some of the dividends back into the people but it's just a little technical physics and i don't see any real effect yet and i think until you seriously change some of the incentives involved in interest rates and exchange rates and corporate governance and payment dividends and competition in the market people are not going to change their behavior systems rigged in that direction and everybody goes in that direction the shanghai taxi driver i talked to i don't know eight years ago or something i said do you invest in the stock market and he said uh yeah make a lot of money said but it's rigged isn't it he said yeah well how do you make money it's just got to figure out which direction they've rigged it in and then you bet on that horse so i think until that stops you're not going to get the kind of market discipline that you need for people to behave differently based on your experience with the oecd how do you think the rest of the world deals with americans at the negotiating table boy is it funny being on the outside um for all our career uh the state department sent telegrams like this world war two system of sending out instructions to the embassies and they were always in all capital letters and american diplomats when they speak they speak in all capital letters and if you don't do what they say they say it more loudly and they say it again and again and again until you understand what they're telling to you one of my bosses said for well this this goes back way too far that said allies means never having to say you're sorry some of us remember from our college days but there's a tendency on american diplomats just say this is the way it's got to be we want it that way that's what it all we ought to do and you can talk till you're blue in the face sometimes and they're not listening and they're not adjusting and they're not thinking about how to modify their positions so i'm hoping that the new email systems that keep getting promised will have not just capitals but small letters and will facilitate a little more listening second rule of diplomacy after people's people is listen first and talk later because usually the other people will say what they want to do and frequently what they want to do can be done your way so better have it better to do it the way they want it than the way you want it but right now at least during most of my career americans are very frustrating to deal with and it was really funny being on the outside what advice do you have for students interested in careers in the international and foreign service read history it's what i didn't do it's what i told my kids they didn't do it either so i'm going to tell you maybe some of you will do that i i think most of the situations where we really got in stupid trouble was because we hadn't read the history we hadn't understood what was going on we didn't know that afghanistan was a country with a history and how the systems worked in the past and how the system didn't work in the past we didn't understand vietnam we didn't understand iraq we didn't understand allies and friends and until we start to understand their history and what they are thinking when you the slavius started falling apart baker and his team went out to belgrade and tried to talk to the leadership there about you know working this out peacefully i can't everybody be nice and my boss at the time margaret tutwiler said she was sitting next to this guy from belgrade it was very sophisticated spoke three languages you know had handkerchief in his pocket and all that stuff and she said she asked him so why can't you guys just work this out and he said but you don't understand in 1389 and she said right there i knew it was just no way we were going to be able to figure this one out and 1389 is not just the serbs and the kosovo problem it's all over the world everybody's got a 1389 we had a moment we were talking to the japanese and the koreans about some of their problem and you saw president obama had to get the two leaders together in brussels a couple weeks ago and we were talking to the japanese and we go over to korea we're talking to the koreans and the koreans look at us and said but they stole our princess thinking they stole your princess what well it's 1262 or something like that they stole their princess you know and they're still fighting over it so until we understand that other people have a different history than us we're new you know not only do we have a short history but we make it up we pretend every four years like nothing's ever happened before and uh other people don't do that so until we start understanding their history we're going to it's going to be hard to deal with them sadly this is our last question for the afternoon how can the u.s regain the trust of the international community i think the first thing is to fix our own problems is really to to take care of the united states make sure we're doing everything right here make sure we're fixing our problems at home not one way or the other the way that everybody can agree upon we have a system that's designed so that the government doesn't do anything that most people don't agree is really important but there's a lot of things that we ought to agree on now and get done i think that on the democracy and the economic side is most important i think second of all we really have to look at things like the nsa spying um that just breeds so much mistrust people already believe that we do everything that they see a mission impossible and james bond and to have that more or less confirmed by edward snowden is really bad for us and the problem is not just edward snowden releasing information the problems that we're doing it we're gonna just stop it and get used to the fact that we're gonna live in a world where we don't collect every phone call we don't listen to every conversation we don't look at everybody's email so i think if people had more trust and we could provide them with the tools they can use to keep themselves safe keep themselves secure take care of their own lives i think we we we get back to the kind of credibility we used to have in the world okay thank you i'd like to thank ambassador richard boucher for his thoughtful informative remarks and for his candor i'd also like to thank all of you for joining us and for a very wide range of questions and i know that there are a number of people who have additional questions for richard and so i hope that you will join us in the great hall we do have a reception and we can continue the conversation more informally there again thank you again for joining us and i hope to see you in another policy talks at the ford school