 This is sort of old home week at CSIS because this is an exit interview with Ambassador Rick Barton, who's Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. He's a beloved figure here at CSIS and he was somebody who stood up a lot of important work on conflict and reconstruction over a period of time. Before he was at the State Department, he was at the United Nations, at the U.S. mission to the United Nations and was one of the ambassadors there covering a number of the different agencies at the United Nations. He also had a period in government service in the Clinton administration where he stood up OTIs, perceived I think rightly so as the founding father of OTIs, so I think many of you know him from that incarnation as well. You also had a previous life, similar to my mentor and friend, Andrew Natsios, as head of the Democratic Party of Maine and my friend and colleague Andrew Natsios, who many of you know was the head of the Republican Party in Massachusetts. I don't know if there's something there that we can dip into, but it's really great to have you and I know you have a lot of, I know I'm sure a lot of people who are watching online as well and a number of CSIS colleagues are here but also planning to drop by to pay their respects and say hello, but you know Rick, maybe what we might do is might just ask you to just spend a few minutes just reflecting a little bit on your most recent iteration of public service. I've got a couple of questions for you, but then we might open it up for a conversation with this very thoughtful audience. Great. First off, thank you very much. It's great to be back here in this beautiful new building to see many old friends. It's always a big blessing to have so many good friends and an audience because you actually know me, so my opportunities to pontificate are lowered from an audience that doesn't have that advantage, so hopefully I won't do too much of that today, but thanks then for the introduction and thanks to all the colleagues from a variety of different settings that I can see out here. It's always great to look at a group of friends and really appreciate your taking the afternoon. I thought I'd like to set the table just by doing three things as quickly as I could so that we can get to the conversation. Excuse me, what I'd like to do is talk about our ambition as this office, this new bureau, the State Department was set up, talk a little bit about the progress we've made and then spend some time on things we still need to do. What's the unfinished business? Because in Washington in this kind of a job there's always plenty that remains to be done and I'd like to draw your attention to what I think is perhaps most important. In terms of what did we set out to do when this bureau was created? The first thing that we wanted to do is we wanted to improve the US government's coherence and effectiveness in conflict settings. There had been a mixed record over the prior couple of decades and you can probably go back several decades so there wasn't a big argument there, there was a whole QDDR process that said we need to do better and what we thought we needed to do was to address the analytical overview, the places that we worked, the organization, the talent, the partnerships and the money. So pretty much everything needed to be addressed. And we started off with a period of very dramatic change. I've likened it at various times to a merger, a hostile takeover, a start up, a turnaround, all blended in one in a change resistant bureaucracy during fiscally constrained times with a very tight timetable. So I remember describing this to a consultant who came in once and offered her help and she said did somebody set you up to fail? And so as evidence that I was probably the right person for the job I hadn't even considered that. So a high degree of naivete is a useful quality when facing these kinds of challenges. So let's talk a little bit about the progress. How do we do? Well the first thing that we try to do is to narrow our focus. We want it to be in places that matter to the United States at an opportune time when there was something we felt the United States could do that would actually make a difference. That screen got us, made a number of decisions for us very early on. We decided to get out of Afghanistan. There were a lot of other parts of the United States government that were doing many, many things. Your bureau out of it? Yeah, our bureau out of Afghanistan. So we were among the first parts of the U.S. government to say okay so much for this but there were a lot of other people doing good things there and it was just a question of what was the value added going to be for our bureau to be there. We did the same thing for South Sudan for very different reasons and then we really tried to pick a series of countries around the world that we could work in. So we did Kenya, Honduras, Burma, Syria, Nigeria, Bangladesh followed on and a number of other countries but we felt those were places that there were particular opportunities for the United States at this time that might make the greatest difference. We tried to build a team of conflict specialists and give them some available liquidity so that they could actually go to places and be able to do something right away. And we wanted them to emphasize local solutions because really the United States is not a great occupier of other countries and does not have an interest in staying for decades and really turning them around in that way. It hasn't done particularly well in that space. And we wanted to be able to do things right away. We thought that there was a competitive advantage in the U.S. government that a lot of people take a year or two or more to really get going and that if we got started faster that that would be a space that we could work in. And a lot of the local solutions were based on something that actually Terry Myers helped us with. Terry right here near the front helped us with in Indonesia back in the 1990s where he put together, he was the USAID mission director, he put together a wonderful group of Indonesians who served as a kind of a senior board of directors for a locally owned initiative that wasn't dependent on the government, it wasn't dependent on a single part of civil society but it was a rich cross section of the most positive people in Indonesia and we were able to work with them and we replicated that in a variety of other ways in other places most recently in Nigeria but some of the work we did in Honduras had elements of that and obviously what we did in Kenya during the election-related violence there with Champions for Peace was built on that. And the final thing we tried to do is we tried to develop trust relationships with key bureaus, USAID, DOD, about 20 or so ambassadors and embassies and what we tried to do as much as possible was to build off an existing platform so we did not have to, so it wasn't about the United States coming in doing something totally new, it was about taking advantage of something that was there and how do you make it grow, how do you make it more productive. So it's been a fairly intense three years to do these things, I'm happy to try to capture them in three or four minutes but it does leave some unfinished business. So just to provoke some of your favorite theories and questions, let me just leave some of the things that I think we still have to do. Number one, we really have to recognize that there's a new era of conflict. There's something almost sentimental about what Putin is doing in the Ukraine. It's so different. It's so old school. It's such a throwback but it's really not what we're facing most places, most of the time these days. And that recognition... Something out of Austin Powers, right? I mean it's... So we really have to let the analysis of the data drive what we do as opposed to our favorite oftentimes antiquated approaches and of course we have huge institutional biases and industries that are driving us to do things in very familiar ways here in Washington but the unfamiliar should be embraced and we really need to otherwise we're really not going to be that effective. The second thing is we have to exploit these global changes to our advantage. It is to our advantage that we have these significant silenced majorities in virtually every country on Earth these days starting with women, okay? That's half the people in most countries. Then you throw in the fact that the demographic is very young and youth, okay, that gets another 25% who aren't women. And so now you're about 75%. The business community typically has to be on the winning side. So they're... They generally like stability. And they like stability so they have a slightly different approach to this. And then of course minorities and others that have to be on the winning side for their own survival. So you start with these large blocks of populations that are instinctively looking for change, instinctively want to have more inclusive governance. They have not been part of the decision-making process. And that's really very much what we're looking for in many of these places. However we express it. The third thing I'd like to mention is that these are obviously closely related is that we need to bring together those who practice what I like to refer to as asymmetric diplomacy. So the people who seem to be most valuable in our political process right now in Washington are people who are kind of recognizing these changes and are actually adjusting their practices. So I think you'd probably make the argument that among the parts of the military of the defense establishment that are most prized by people right now are people who are able to move into the space. I believe that OTI and some others in the development community who have been... who have proven to be a bit more agile and a bit more opportunistic about what's being offered in these places have taken on a greater importance than the size of the organization or their budget would otherwise indicate. And the same for obviously diplomats who are willing to practice in a somewhat more open fashion and recognize that it's going to be hard to get an embassy open or hard to get onto an embassy or a lot of the kinds of restrictions that are taking place these days. You still have to get the analysis. You still have to get the on the ground insight. You still have to do an awful lot of what we want from these people. But we cannot just say we'll have a new era of expeditionary diplomacy and then not get them into the country in the first place. That doesn't really serve much of an answer. And then the final point I'd like to make just in terms of a change is that within the bureaucracy we obviously have to come together. We have to stay together. We have to avoid the natural bureaucratic fractionalization. There seems to be a tendency in almost every discussion for people to think what where they sit. So if they represent an office or bureau or department or whatever it happens to be you can almost always count on what they're going to say. And to me that reduces it increases caution which I think we have probably in excess here in Washington. One of my favorite exercises over the last few months has been to ask my colleagues in the State Department if we had a virtuous scale and on one end of the scale was native caution a wonderful quality and on the other end of the scale is American ingenuity also a wonderful quality. Where do you think we are here at the State Department? And it probably won't surprise too many of you to hear that 95% of the answers say we're right up here against native caution and the other 5% say we're over here on native caution. So nobody features that American ingenuity is actually one of our calling cards and having been at the UN for a couple years our colleagues the other countries look to the United States for ideas or solutions for problem solving and much less for gee you can't do it for this reason you can't do it for that reason which generally is a big part of our conversations inside of the government for those of you who've had the benefit and I see a number of you've had the benefit of being inside and outside so it's not that there's a recklessness that will result I'm not worried about that in Washington I really much worried about the creativity zone and the space and making sure that we move to that so I just want you to know most of all that I have found this five-year period to be extraordinarily challenging very rewarding I've had wonderful colleagues I'm optimistic about what we could do I wish I had done more but I've been very pleased with the opportunity and the honor of serving the president to really find secretary's estate and a number of colleagues who are here in the room plus those who are not so thank you all for coming today and I'll look forward to your encomiums in a few questions now I'm hoping next summer you're gonna we're gonna go we're gonna go skiing together in Argentina so you have to put that in your list one of the things Rick Rick spent some time growing up in Argentina so your Rick was born in Argentina so he cannot run for president unfortunately but you can run for president of Argentina so that may be one of the things you could consider doing actually but you know you know it's actually I don't want to I don't want to get into a constitutional argument here but my father was a diplomat that's right so this was McCain had this so the hospital bed that my mother was was birthed me on was US territory the good news for all of you is there is no draft that's right that's right so well but sleep well tonight so so Rick I've got several questions for you I know there'll be others in the audience but can you just talk a little bit about just you mean you spent a lot of time here at CSIS you're an OTI you're at the UN you've been at the State Department now can you explain why it's I think you you've talked about some of the things that need to be done could you just spend a little bit of time or in some of it in your suggestions are implied in what the diagnosis is but why is it so hard for the United States to do conflict or do reconstruction what what is it is it genetic is it the arrangement of our government is it the ADD in our political life what is it about us that that we don't you know we don't do this well where this isn't something that we we do well but we've we've been bumping up against this increasingly in a number of different contexts obviously Afghanistan and Iraq are the ones that sit there but those are as you just described there's a whole universe of other countries we could talk about but I think it starts with a certain immodesty I don't know how well any of you do with a friend who has a problem or a child who has a problem but I find that my the space that I'm able to influence events is usually very cleanly defined usually by the behaviors of the person that I'm helping and I don't know that it gets that much easier when I'm suddenly thinking about 160 million Nigerians or or 200 million Indonesians or 180 million Bangladeshis whatever it shouldn't really get easier in fact it should get a whole heck of a lot more complicated that would be my that would be my base assumption so I think our natural instinct to solve problems is a wonderful instinct and our ability to bring resources to it and and really one of the greatest gifts of all being an American is that you're actually invited to these conversations it's the Chinese are hardly ever invited to the conversation it's okay if they build me a new university outside of the city but I don't really want them to help me with a difficult political problem that has subtlety to it and that's true of just about every other country and your immediate neighbors so we are asked to every one of these conversations that has a natural inflating effect it naturally makes you feel kind of more important and even as a even as a relatively modest US ambassador at the UN there is a feeling that some people are actually waiting to hear me whereas some of the other countries you sort of think they're gonna have to say something clever to be heard today so we start with that natural advantage but you can't overplay it and this it would be the advantage of being a friend or being a parent or whatever else you cannot overplay that so I think I think that would be the first thing I think the second thing is that with that mindset we oftentimes miss the enormity of the task so even getting a single friend to change let's say but smoking yeah my wife smoked the first decade of our marriage at least and I can assure you that my influence was modest it wasn't because I didn't have the facts and the arguments even even a moral high graph was given to me over time but so so I think that what I really noticed in in particular in Iraq was the enormity of the task was so underestimated and so there we were now the things you were describing our organizational structure is is absolutely not set up for this and one of the places that I would like to see I believe there are little things that could make a huge difference and in fact and that's the way you have to work in these countries as well and that's the way you generally work on any problem you you take a big problem and you try to figure out how do I make an elephant how do I get a if I'm starving how do I get a bite out of a live elephant well you know right away you think I'm gonna wait till he falls asleep I mean that or whatever there's some there's some really there's some insight there's something you're gonna that's gonna be okay now I got a shot at this and so I think that the very little bureaucratic thing that I think could be done is I believe whenever there's a crisis coming or a crisis shaping up that the State Department because it is the logical convener because it has the natural advantage of having the ambassador of the country and you cannot really do anything in a country without the ambassador you can't get into the country if you're a ID or you're the Defense Department unless the crisis gets way over the top so use the State Department as the natural convener but force the State Department and AID in particular to come together in the first 24 hours of a designated crisis and whether it's a big one or a little one the same process where you have the the under secretary for for Wendy Sherman the deputy at AID and the undersecretary for Jay like a Sarah Sewell those three people within 24 48 hours should be responsible for giving the Secretary of State the name or the names of two or three people who would actually serve as the center of gravity for the crisis and let that person move a foot have the authority to move money have the authority to move people have a standing board of directors which so if it's a humanitarian case or let's say it's a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown that's a very different kind of a leader than if it happens to be a cool car or and then thousands of people being killed on the street and which and it's probably gonna have more of a multilateral feelings so the nature of it but what we do now is we don't really we were worried that we're gonna create another Holbrook which scares the entire institution but somewhere between Richard Holbrook and and a Harry desk officer we should be able to find somebody who could actually be capable enough to run meetings 24 seven call us together say we're spending eight hundred million dollars in Kenya we have an election coming up election related violence could flatten everything in the country we're spending six hundred million on AIDS we love AIDS will they please go to the Hill make the argument that we had to rejigger some of the money yeah that's I mean so the the the agility of people the liquidity and then but then the strategic focus what what are the three most important things because the minute you put a problem on the table what you always hear is I'm helping out and so 10 people doing their best everybody offering what they normally do but a little bit better than usual and I've had some of you are at this conversation the other day at Hopkins that Sandra Susan and others were at but I've had people who have have consistently felt that that they could go into almost any case and make it better but when we went to the when we looked at the Syria case we asked people all those people we got them all together in our room this is one of the things that CSO can really help to do and we said if all of us do our work as well as we possibly could how do we think things are going to go in Syria over the next six months and guess what the consensus was in the room with all of us exceeding our normal performance the consensus was that things would get worse God so given that your natural instinct would be maybe we have to think about what we might what else we might do how we would do it differently that would be that would be a normal human condition but no what what we generally do is we go back and say how do we do more of what we're doing already and if we could just do more of this or that so I believe that a simple organizational structure forces people to put forward good names not just retired ambassadors and retired generals not just the underemployed colleague but you actually have to find somebody that you feel has leadership quality and I have to say one of the one of the most exciting opportunities I had in my life and why I go back to this example this model is that when Brian Atwood was running a ID and then we had the coastal crisis he asked me and I was out of place in the bureaucracy to be that coordinator for a ID and of course the geographic girl was in shock but then within two weeks they realized that almost everybody was working on my team was from so they had enough spies there to make sure I wasn't getting out of line so that's exactly I mean that's sort of how it works so so let's acknowledge the really basics the real simple things and deal with a long answer but I hope this is that you're you got where that's let me ask a little bit you've touched on this could you just further elaborate on the aid-state relationship you've talked about it in a number of different ways but just a little bit further you've been at both you've seen both sides now and you've been an ambassador so you've been at main state you've been it an ambassador and you've been at AID so what you think you've described sort of one ideal situation in the form of a crisis is how how should especially and I think you've just I think you've implied on some of the ways this should work but you might just elaborate a little bit further because I'm sure this is one of the questions in the room well and it's not just aid-state but it's military state with a lot of people the State Department can always do a better job of being more inclusive of being more respectful of others views it's it's there's a time I was there's a little bit of a caste system in this town and and there is even within the State Department of obviously we have foreign service officers and then we well we have political point is who are may or may not be in the caste system at times are above or below of an FSO and then we have civil servants and then we have a lot of other folks and and it's not it's just not very American so it's not it's not the healthiest quality of our institution I think I think of these relationships as being brought with potential so they they they could be a ton better so having given the critique of state I would offer a critique of AID which is constant insecurity some of it we're always afraid we're gonna have our lunch money taking our lunch money away it's the little rich kid comes in the room somebody gonna pick my pocket come on come with ideas come with solutions and don't worry about being bullied at the table there are and if and if they're bullying behaviors call them out so so it's kind of an interesting business I don't think this is totally true but people have said that the State Department is passive aggressive they've said that that AID is passive passive and they've said that the defensive arm is aggressive aggressive I don't know that any of that is true but but it doesn't lead to a sort of a family of three siblings I happen to be the second dysfunctional family so and these are these are fairly fundamental qualities and again they obviously overcome by wonderful people who work through a great ambassadors in a country who make the country team feel perfect great mission directors who find a way to deal with a difficult ambassador or not but again I mean this is it's so human I don't want to keep bringing everything back to the human dimension here but we have a lot of it's human we have the potential to really make these things work a lot better than they do and a certain impatience with with them we've become many of us have become enablers because it's what people say I know how to get things done it's like well yeah but you've you've got it done in a way that has created the most exotic maze that nobody else will be able to do it this way well okay so so when I when I hear around town about the foreign assistance act and there's a discussions about there was some pushed by former congressman Berman to try and fix some of this congressionally there was some sense that at the State Department some people said no don't don't mess we know how to work this this Rube Goldberg system don't don't go that direction could you just could you just based on what you've just said what do you think that there needs to be some sort of congressional fix to the current maze of the things that we we have currently or well again if they could do it it'd be great it's it's just I mean they haven't had it they haven't had it 1986 was a partial one yeah they haven't had an authorization since 1986 yeah so yeah I'd be wonderful it'd be a good challenge I happen to think that actually we have CSO has benefited greatly from the conversation that CSIS was a big part of but that that senator Luger initiated and actually one of the one of the nicest compliments that I've heard in this in this last month where my deputy says you're in the halo effect period where everything I do will be heralded and so it's not bad actually because it's not it's not in the State Department it's not so affirming that you can't stand a month of compliments but but one of the things that somebody said to me who's working on our Syria portfolio not for the Department of Syria portfolio he said the way that CSO is working now is fulfilling some of senator Luger's biggest dreams and I thought that was very very flattering and I and he was trying to think about how you saw this and Congressman Berman was doing the same thing and they're just they're trying to figure out hey if we can't make it work on a human level let's make it work through through a restructuring and rules I tend to be somebody who feels that a lot of the reorganizations that people go through are overwrought and that we should spend more time on actually just showing the sincerity of our of our commitment to change in our daily behaviors and then let's go for the bigger fix because and bigger fix by that point won't need to be as big yeah I I tend to agree with that all right look there's I want to give some time for some very thoughtful people to have some questions so if you'll raise your hands I'll call on you I'm gonna be interested to see if any of my employees I know loaded questions we start with this woman up front just to just when you ask the question just turn around so we're gonna do a bunch it will bunch them together we'll do this World Bank style so we'll get this this woman up front and then I'm gonna get Michael Levitt back there and then this woman here so these this woman this woman and then Michael will do these three of them will do another round I'll see if I can remember all three questions yeah and and I would just if you don't mind I would say within the context of say starting January the 20th 2017 right in that context so and then let's have this woman up neck over here Jeremiah this this no this woman first in this this and then we'll get you in the next round then we get Michael should I start again with Patricia Fagan Georgetown University and I want to follow up with a similar kind of question to the last person and that is you you gave the example of how even the very best effort of the very best people in Syria would probably not yield results of anybody would applaud much as they would want to do that but surely I mean you've had successes in this job this job has not gone badly every single case so what's meant with the countries you have here Syria okay not so great Burma Honduras Bangladesh Kenya and Nigeria none of them are none of them are cases to celebrate none of them are so none of them have been none of the problems none of them have problems that have been solved but where would the successes be and how would you define an anatomy of a success including what allies were most helpful in making whatever the initiative CSO was sure sure Michael Levitt thank you and thank you having had the pleasure of both working for Dick's Glare and Kosovo and surviving that and being a CPA contract survivor I've been fascinated by CSO from the first time you spoke here at the old building three years ago whatever you made a couple of big points we're not going to compete with OTI we're not going to compete with AID we're going to be different and one of the ways you made this point was we have to act quickly we have to be able to be measured in six and nine month components and I'm wondering and I've tried to keep up with your weekly non classified report what are the results in the countries are you named some countries are they more stable are they more peaceful are they better off because of CSO initiatives we'll just keep those those are okay well let me let me sort of take those last two questions and then the advice to a successor I haven't prepared my three envelopes yet so I so that's a good question and I need another second to think about it maybe double back with better answers is that as the afternoon goes on but in terms of in terms of solving problems I think that the ambition in working in these places should be to advance peaceful democratic change that doesn't mean that you have solved the problem but you are trying to give people in particular the people of the place the capacity to have a fighting chance to make it on their own and that's that that's my ambition I think that's still wildly ambitious but it's not it isn't full ownership of the problem or G you haven't you haven't made all these changes yet so having said that I do feel as if we've made real progress I think in Kenya was an interesting case and I had obviously had a very violent prior election where over a thousand people have been killed hundreds of thousands of people had left their houses and had had to flee and it was it was clear that the possibility of that happening again was great now we were able to identify a way to work in the country and we started with the two places that we thought were most likely to be most volatile but we're also able to bring together a really unlikely cast of characters so one of the most uplifting meetings that I've ever been to in my career was sitting with the dozen or so recipients of the greatest amount of US assistance that the AID democracy officer had brought together out in the Rift Valley and to ask and the conversation went something like this because we had a we had one hour to sort of see whether we could mobilize this this group of people at the doing something they otherwise would not normally do and the conversation went went like this what do you think is the biggest problem facing your country this year election related violence are you doing everything that you could to help address that no would you like to do more yes what might you do first person to speak I run a horticulture program in this area I only have four thousand farmers in my program and I don't know what I could do so the conversation then went to this point I said look I've had a background American politics and if you start with 4,000 farmers I could be elected governor of any state except for Texas next year and somehow every Kenyan in the room got it okay they seem to have a picture of Texas they seem to understand what 4,000 farmers moving the same direction might look like so there we go so then the next person was it was emboldened by that and she said well we only visit 225,000 households a week in this in this region to check up on AIDS and that seems to be kind of an interesting resource so we that's kind of a big number yeah it seemed like a big number so we focused on early warning early response now we couldn't possibly get Americans over there in the space of time that was available the three months that were available for before the election but they all offered if you could help us pay for an additional staffer or two that we can identify in the next few weeks we will turn this asset into something that will work with the police and with this other sort of the general the usual suspects and see if we can have more impact on early warning early response and that's so so there was a champions of peace initiative 200 people were hired we were able to move the money in six weeks through a couple of international NGOs but all to local hire we didn't have to met the people we didn't have to hire them we didn't have to do any of the stuff that you normally do if it's a US program so Honduras the same thing there was a wonderful wonderful group of people of civil society people called the Alianza the broadest coalition ever they came together they've had a huge influence on getting rid of a bad attorney general on coming together and making sure the presidential election did not run away from the homicides and the huge violence in the society but it hasn't it doesn't mean that the homicide rate has dropped yet they've also had an influence on on people being prosecuted investigations and prosecution successful of of homicides things that weren't happening before so a lot of this stuff is just getting the muscle memory and by the way an awful lot of what you end up doing in the bureaucracy is getting the muscle memory so that you hope that the next couple of generations of people will actually do things differently as opposed to falling back on kind of the more familiar habits so I feel as if we made progress I think in Burma the United States had three issues that we were interested on the strategic level in Burma one was we want to open the political process to we want to we want to deal with the ethnic conflicts that have existed there for decades now and number three we want to do business it turns out that doing business with Burma is not that hard a lot of people want to do it and there's a lot going on it doesn't need that much US assistance although it's not bad and there's good assistance be offered there obviously telecommunications industry whatever that's going to go in there but the political process has its own internal rhythm nobody really wanted to deal with the most delicate problem of all these ethnic groups and what do we deal with them and how do we come to a national some sort of a national ceasefire we're about to get to a national ceasefire it's taking a couple years that will be and every single month I've been told it's going to happen this month so I think it will happen in the next couple months so I do feel that there's progress taking place but but you really you should be modest enough to look for progress and and things going in the right direction rather than that we're there to correct it all right so how about how about this issue of a January 2017 new Secretary of State well I still believe that you have to have the you have to have integrated teams in this day and age so you cannot have people everybody doing their best work separately and incoherently I do it at the heart of it and I do believe that that's something that that CSO has plenty of work to do but it's it's it should be not as the lead but as the guarantor that the coherence and the integration of teams is happening and the earlier it happens the less likely we are to suffer the sort of sprawling US interventions that don't produce that somehow produce less than the some of their parts so I still believe that's probably one of the most logical things we could do I do think that that that creating not not having quite so much entitlement within the US government so if it's a ID we're entitled to do this if it's the Geographic Bureau we're entitled to running this it's it should be there should be a more meritocratic system because that's kind of American and I so I don't I don't actually like the I don't like the the you get this because you've always done it I'm okay with three people having different human rights arguments and I've been in meetings in the White House where somebody has said somebody said I know I'm stepping way outside of my lane here and it's been by far the best contribution at the meeting so all right so let's let's hear from Sarah and then this woman here and then we'll also hear from this gentleman here so Sarah this woman and this gentleman over here hi Sarah Mendelssohn former USA current CSIS former CSIS Rick we're old friends so I'm gonna take advantage and push you a little bit I've been struggling to understand what the comparative advantage and distinctive value of CSO is and I greatly benefited from I don't know if you were calling them tabletops but sort of gathering interagency to talk about Zimbabwe and various futures I have to push back on the characterization of Kenya Kenya was a extraordinary experience from June July 2010 through March 2013 the interagency worked better together on that one set of issues than I saw any other issue and still trying to understand why it worked well on Kenya CSO was a piece but it was a huge interagency part of it and I think you know lots of Kenyans will find that it was not a terrific outcome but in terms of a bureaucratic machinery it actually worked quite well so my my question to you is I hear you talking about integration and I just don't see any of yourself outlined how bureaucratically what the challenges are we were always in dacha trying to not just OTI but off to DRG Center CMM what is the comparative advantage what it what does CSO do that we can't do that we need CSO to do because we're there's so much work to be done and when we figure that out it goes like grease right it's it moves easily but if it doesn't there is this friction and I think it's too easy sort of fallback to say well AID is insecure I don't think a lot of my colleagues are insecure I think that they're incredibly busy and if they feel that they're being put in a box to only do natural disasters when there's a huge amount of equity on the political side that's a misuse of both dacha toolbox and the larger USA so I mean I think it's it's complicated but really trying to understand the the three or four or two things that CSO brings to the table rather than the integrated piece because I think people are going to constantly push back on on the integration okay let's get this woman here this woman and I'm gonna call on Ed Fox those are gonna be the four hi I'm bastard Barton I don't know it's been a long time but I'm Grace Kong and I was in the CRC I was sitting in INL and I have a number of questions but I'll just zero in on this as a concrete one one question just one it has to do with this effort to have greater interagency cooperation and this is actually inter bureau within the State Department I was asked by CSO to help out with something I had been working on with Haiti and a woman there wanted me to be her deputy and I really wanted to do it and so because of this bizarre way the bureaucracy is set up I had to ask the office director in my INL office if I could go ahead and work with the CSO person and CSO was paying my salary the INL person said no we wanted to work on something here and it frankly I did not think it was that significant but I couldn't fight it CSO didn't fight they just you know they just deferred to the other bureaus and so I ended up not being able to do what I really wanted to do and what I was hired for which was a CSO jet so that's a very concrete example of some HR issues within the State Department and how you want to bring talent from one part to the other right well no it's not I'm just that's my gentle way of suggesting that I'm gonna ask everyone and to briefly I'm gonna ask you to go and then you to go and each of you are gonna be brief and so get 20 seconds to wrap up okay so it was not an HR issue it was all about leadership in one bureau refusing to try to exert leadership over another person and I you know so please explain when you say you want greater in our agency or greater coordination but yet in my concrete experience no one was willing to exercise it okay thank you okay sir thanks very much my questions on conflict prevention which was as I just had part of your brief CSO my question is is there any unit Department agency of the US government that has a lead with authorities proper authorities and sufficient staff and resources to in fact lead develop a strategy lead in conflict prevention I don't see one and if not how should that be structured thank you for modeling brief that's great and you'd be the model of brevity as well Ed Fox here's the microphone never known for that I'm Ed Fox as a former Assistant Secretary of State and Assistant Administrator of AID I learned to do the splits a long time ago I would just point out that we have a strange thing going on USA ID was created by President Kennedy to pull together all the various Marshall plan and other organizations so that we could have it concentrated in one place so the government could focus over time it's just gone all over the place and it's getting much worse we now have whole of government which means everybody can jump into the pool and everybody wants to do their own thing I remember when Condi Rice was testifying and she was asked a few years ago how much money do you have for democracy she couldn't answer that because she didn't control all the programs which is what led to the F process so we got this tug of war where people don't have real assignments that they know are theirs there's no expertise we're farming out everything we're doing AID doesn't implement anymore so we're relying on a whole bunch of private sector people and president comes up with PEPFAR and he doesn't give it to AID because he knows AID isn't well-liked it isn't well-structured and he doesn't because he doesn't have the political will to change AID this was president Bush president Bush and it's the same thing with MCC he doesn't use any of the existing structures you create a new one so you're spreading it around creating more centers of power and less coordination and so here we are with whole of government we got a huge Ebola crisis and what's the president do he sends 3,000 people from the military over there instead of putting a civilian face on this thing undermined certainly the the image and the personal views of all people who are working in the civilian side of this thing I just think that you know your tasks are are great but it's larger than you it's the whole governmental structure we have to decide is it better to focus attention and put authority in one place are we going to just proliferate and have everybody doing everything okay well let me just start on the last one actually one of the one of the places where there's the greatest clarity in the entire US government is when you get into a country and the ambassador actually has a pretty clear need responsibility I know that Mark Bellamy's here but people you can't even get into the country with your program with your money or anything else unless you get country clearance and starts so there's so it's not and it's not a bad example to me it to me it works quite well you can't get in as a co-com if the ambassador doesn't watch you there so we're capable of doing it it doesn't mean that all every ambassador is brilliant or anything else but anyway there's a model there that it does work and I that's one of my major arguments is that we need to create that an equally clear center of gravity or leadership model here in Washington I happen to think that it's more likely to reside at the State Department than anywhere else because you don't really get much convening authority the Defense Department or AID or the other two places the ID if he calls a meeting it doesn't get everybody from all over the government that's just the one of the it doesn't have that natural advantage inside of a country that that the embassy offers that doesn't mean that it can be mismanaged which I would say the State Department is guilty of many many times and it doesn't convene it is not it doesn't model inclusive leadership particularly well I think there are many many occasions when AID people could be in the lead it could be selected by this process because they're best suited to this particular task that is being faced so I happen to think that's one of the things that CSO could do needs to do and it will have the opportunity to do better because but not just as a coordinator the coordinator is about the weakest position you can possibly have in the US government I had somebody once tell me don't ever ever ever ever ever ever except the job of coordinator and I heard him and then because it's extraordinarily weak unless you have the authority and some some responsibility for the money so I do believe that at the end of the day one of the things that has to happen with an organization like CSO is it has to have more influence about where the money is going as well we've been an honest broker to F well we don't we don't take most of the 1207 money that we had we gave back to AI we gave to AID and to INL but when we're at the table we're trying to figure out who's best suited to do this job as opposed to G can I have a little bit more money for my budget that is like that is a radically different outlook at most meetings that if you go into the meeting you're not trying to grab the money for yourself it's very different and and I can't say that I've seen that behavior by many of my colleagues irrespective of where they are and so it has to you have to have somebody in that role I see an honest broker role I see a need for a joint analysis I can't have everybody running off and doing their own analysis because guess what you send the refugee people there or you send the AIDS people there what do they always come back and say they're always refugees and there are always AIDS of course there is but what's most important what's the common understanding the problem because we can't take on the problem in all of its facets at the same time so I believe that's another function that a that CSO can help with because I've seen the self-serving of the bureaucracy and I've obviously been capable of doing it myself but I think this particular function is designed to cut into that and to make sure we don't get in that direction and Sarah will know personally from conversations I've had with her my impatience with her when she made a highly bureaucratic argument to me about you know a team that we were sending to a country I you know I I don't want to indulge that and I don't think it's adult behavior to indulge it and so but we do every day here in this town and I think it's a real issue for us I think the prioritized strategies have got to follow the common understanding we can't say that every problem has the dimension of your of what you bring to the toolkit so every problem is a if you've got a hammer every problem is a nail absolutely look the United States shows up every time it's 10 separate with 10 separate initiatives and the ambassador I've had ambassadors say to me the only two people of this embassy that I feel are working for me right now are your two people because the whole rest of the portfolio is a legacy portfolio it's been there for five or ten years and the problem that has just arisen that's most on his or her mind may not be addressed by the by the legacy portfolio and that's that's kind of I mean one of the things that Terry did that was really unusual in Indonesia is he said we actually have to flip our portfolio to fit the time and they looked aggressively at actually making the portfolio more related to the transition problem facing the country rather than of course it has a health need of course it has all the other needs that were in the existing portfolio that's very unusual but it's not impossible because look Terry's still alive and so so then then I would say the same thing for the objective review and the evaluation I mean you've got to you've got to have somebody who sits outside of the outside of the system and hires their friends to evaluate their programs okay that's another thing the CSO really probably should do long term because otherwise you know everybody says that they did they had brilliant programming and I and I don't think and I don't think we really do that pretty well so those are things that I think are still out there to be done but it's going to take a while because it's it's there's just such an ingrained look there are there are really in great attitudes people have real attitudes and whether whether it's insecurity or whether it's another attitude or whether it's arrogance and that's and that's pretty much the range from insecurity arrogance is covers just about everything I can think of there's a lot of behavior in between and anybody who's been there has seen it on a daily basis and if you haven't that your level of denial is beyond my ability to address this is great Rick because I feel this okay so let me let me ask one last question for you and then we do have to end it and people can can chat with Rick afterwards you you mentioned something about institutional biases and perhaps even sort of almost industrial or sort of specific could you just push a little bit further on that issue of you said in some of this you've you've come up with but you said we you know we we have some huge institutional biases and some in fact even some in some organizations that are sure you just push a little bit further on that please well again yes okay Terry you get the I'm gonna give you the green show shoes so you get that excuse my biases on that but I want to defend Sarah on the bureaucratic position as a long-time bureaucratic CSO I think as you pointed out had terrific convening authority and much better than AID a lot a lot in convening but we're pretty good on the operational side in large part because you gave us a flexible agile unit in OTI I always said an example for the rest of the agency it was very good do you think that in the future for CSO if they focused on its convening power and its analytical power and left the operational programs and projects to implementing units like OTI that it would overcome some of the bureaucratic infighting that CSO fix yeah you know first off I would say that particular piece of bureaucratic infighting has not been terribly debilitating the so it's an interesting one but it's not one that has consumed the whole heck of a lot of my time so just just so you know that somebody once said to me maybe you that 50% of my time my diplomatic time would be taken with diplomacy inside of the State Department and I used that for a while and then somebody came up to me said that's hopelessly naive at least 80% of your time has to be and I said now I really understand my job because 80% of my time is doing this and the other 80% of my time is doing the rest of the job but the the the tension that tension has not been very great in my mind but but where I would push back Terry is this that I don't want I don't believe that we should have monopolies of anything okay it's just not a very American model and when we get monopolistic we end up oftentimes with great inefficiencies we worry about the inefficiencies of excessive duplication and they are and they're worth considering but at the same time when you get people who get in a groove and do some new things a certain way you also get huge inefficiencies so you want to keep you want to at least have the opportunity to challenge conventions and to see if there are different ways of doing it and of course you want to go to the people who are have the primary responsibility and say are you capable of doing this and are you interested in doing it and show me your sincerity in doing this of course we want to get to that but I don't believe that that is that I that's not the natural model in Washington an awful lot of people kind of hive off spaces and then get a bit static in their space and and I would say that that would be true for sure of the of the State Department and since I'm a card carrying humanitarian it's true of that community I'm a card carrying development person it's true of that community card carrying diplomat it's true of that community so you know I think I think a little bit of introspection here suggests that we we actually need to not think so much in terms of comparative space but competitive because competitive actually keeps people a little bit more on edge and they have to produce a little better product or engage leadership that does that yeah absolutely but the portfolio but the portfolio was as has been mentioned the Kenyon portfolio was totally dependent on the partnership the radio partnership so it wasn't and probably it was it was an awkward moment because we had we had an ambassador that was was separated from his mission at that point and so there was a lot of work to be done and we probably had a team that did nothing but kind of work through those relationships and actually bring a very fractured embassy more together we can't take credit for having done it but we were clearly among the few people who were whose job was dedicated to dealing with that fracture as opposed to dealing with their programming and everything else so it comes I think you got to just I mean I've looked at it in terms of agility you got it you got a tool why would you want to limit its approaches I happen to think some of the programming can really produce among the best analysis out there so the work we've done with the Syrians the Syrian has been extraordinarily helpful early on to identifying who are some of the good partners and those partners have been passed on to OTI and others and in theory the whole program is not gonna be passed on so that we will not continue as operators so it would be a startup effort I don't know that is I think you don't want to under underestimate I think one of the things that state does badly and the intelligence community does badly is underestimates how much learning we should be getting from a lot of AIDs programs that's not as institutionalized as it could be so there's lots of room for for strengthening here but I don't I honestly haven't found that to be a particularly distracting are people spend a lot of time working with their AID partners we have joint missions that go out to do the analysis in most of these places but but it's one that I hear a lot about but I haven't found it to be quite as distracting as as I think others think it is Rick we should stop here but I know they're gonna be focused I want to grab you bilaterally I'm almost sure of that please join me in thanking Rick