 Good afternoon and welcome to the United States Institute of Peace. My name is Elise Grande and I am the head of USIP, which was established by the US Congress in 1984 as a nonpartisan public institution dedicated to preventing, mitigating, and resolving violent conflict abroad. We're delighted to host today's discussion of Ambassador Fred Hof's new book on the inside story of the secret attempt to reach a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement between 2009 and 2011. USIP is proud to be publishing this important book. As a young bureaucrat in the United Nations decades ago, I was gently warned that diplomacy is never straightforward. It's always stressful and fraught, only rarely successful, but nonetheless urgent and indispensable in all matters related to global peace and security. Fred's wonderful book takes us deep into a diplomatic effort that nearly succeeded and, if it had, would have redrawn fault lines in the Middle East, potentially bringing greater stability to one of the world's most volatile regions, if only. We're here today with an exceptional panel to reflect on the diplomatic strategy that was used during these secret negotiations and to reflect on why the effort ultimately did not succeed. We're very grateful to the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University for their partnership and support of today's event. For colleagues who are joining us virtually around the world, we encourage you to join the conversation on social media by using the hashtag BrokeringPeaceUSIP. I'm now very pleased to introduce Ambassador Barbara Bodine, our distinguished moderator for today's conversation. Ambassador Bodine is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy and Director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. Barbara served as Ambassador to the Republic of Yemen, Deputy Principal Officer in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War, Deputy Chief of Mission in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion, and as the Senior State Department Official and First Coalition Coordinator for the Reconstruction of Baghdad. Barbara has also served in leadership positions on countering terrorism in the Near East and East Africa. Prior to joining Georgetown, Barbara directed policy task forces and policy workshops on U.S. diplomacy for seven years at Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs. She has been a senior fellow at the Kennedy School and at MIT, is a past president of mine awareness group, and the recipient of the Secretary of State's Award for Valor for her work in occupied Kuwait. Madam Ambassador Barbara, the floor is yours. Thank you for that very kind introduction and thank you for inviting us to be a partner in this, and I hope in future programs. I am the Director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. A bit of a counterpart to USIP. Our mission at Georgetown, we've been around for about almost 45 years, is to try to bridge the gap between the academic richness that is both at Georgetown University and across this town and the work of the practitioners on diplomacy and solving the world's problem, bringing peace. I've always been aware that, and we talked about this at lunch, that diplomacy is the art of working the intractable problems that we're always trying to fix that which no one else can fix. Sometimes we're successful, sometimes we get close, sometimes not. But it is an effort that we continue to believe that is at the core of our national security and also the stability, the prosperity, and the quality of life for people around the world. This is a particular pleasure to be part of this panel. Fred and I go back more decades than I'm going to admit publicly to when we were first studying Arabic in Tunisia, and he famously said, as I and some of my State Department colleagues were on our way to Baghdad and Khartoum and a few other places, and Fred in those days was in the Army, that the State Department went places the Army wouldn't bother to invade, a standard that they dropped later. But it's been wonderful to work with Fred over the decades and to work with him particularly the passion that he has for trying to resolve the issues within Syria and Syria and its neighbors. And also Chet Crocker, who is actually the moderator of the panel today. Very much my pleasure and honor to introduce Chet Crocker. Especially for some of our younger members in the audience, Chet is what can best be described as a certified elder statesman, as well as an eminence scholar and a respected practitioner of diplomacy. An elder statesman, by the way, by way of clarification, is more than just an aged diplomat. Age of diplomats are a dime a dozen in Washington, and only the most pretentious would refer to themselves as a statesman. Chet, however, is a statesman. The distinguishing characteristics are not just senior positions in authority and some experience in foreign policy, again a dime a dozen in Washington, but the quality of judgment and of wisdom. It is length of service across a lifetime in government, academia, and the private sector, and constructive engagement on matters of import to the state and to the world. It is work also over time to bring these lessons learned and this wisdom to rising generations of policymakers. And Chet is all of that. He is currently the James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Fellow in Strategic Studies, which is a mouthful, at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, and he is also, along with Lease, a longstanding member of the Institute's Board of Advisors, and I thank you both. His teaching at Georgetown has focused on conflict management and regional security issues. Chet quite literally wrote the book on conflict management. In fact, he wrote eight, and a number of them have been published by USIP, and all of them are shared with my students on conflict management. They serve as a how-to guide for those working on these kind of wicked and intractable issues. Chet is perhaps best known for his work in the 1980s as US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, where he was the principal diplomatic architect and mediator in the prolonged negotiations between Angola, Cuba and South Africa that led to Namibia's independence and the withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola. Prior to serving as Assistant Secretary, he served as Director of Master of Service and Foreign Service at Georgetown, Director of African Affairs at CSIS and at the National Security Council. He was also, for nearly 20 years, the chair or member of USIP's Board and a founding member of the Global Leadership Foundation and member of the Independent Advisory Board of the World Bank. So if anyone can moderate this panel and bring a breadth and depth of experience and wisdom, it is my friend and my colleague Chet, so thank you, Chet, for joining us today. And with that, I turn the chair to you. Thank you very much, Barbara. I am not going to stand. I'm going to sit here and moderate from a chair. But I appreciate very much all the kind words that you have shared that you and Lee's have shared. I want to thank both ISD and USIP for giving us this event today. We're really very fortunate indeed that we have a chance to celebrate an outstanding book. In fact, I was trying to capture, as I was making a couple of notes, what are the characteristics of this book that Fred Hof has written. It is a book that is courageous. It's a book that's gripping. I think for those who are current or future practitioners, it is sobering. And it's also very, very candid and courageous. So go buy it. It's a rare book because it's a first-hand account of all the things that you can accomplish as a diplomat. And it's a rare account of a diplomacy that almost worked and why it didn't quite. And that's unusual. I can say from first-hand experience, and I'm sure many others in the room will be familiar with this, that many people who write their memoirs about what they did in public service write about how they slayed the dragons and how we got from here to there and what was the secret of our success. And what Fred has done is to give us the lessons learned in a very different kind of experience, and it takes guts to do that. So we're very fortunate that we have you here to say a few words. I'm going to ask Fred some questions in a moment here. Before I do that, I just want to salute the Peace Institute for publishing this book and to urge all those who make decisions around here, and I'm looking around the room, please, that we need more books of this kind, more reports, more studies, more research of this kind by practitioners. We've done it some in the past. This is our latest, and it's terrific. So let's hope that we do more of it. I'm going to start with a couple of questions that I will pose to all of our panelists starting with Fred, but the other three panelists who are with us today. And I assume everybody has the bios. Is that correct? Bios have been circulated, so I'm not going to repeat the bios of our speakers. But these are questions for all of our panelists starting with Fred. Question number one, how important is it to really know your case? How important is it to master the file, to really, really be able to have a granular, to know the case better than the parties know it, or at least as well as the parties know it, so that they don't run circles around you and throw up all kinds of factual obstacles to progress. So is mastering the file really important? Next question, is it a problem if a mediator has a bios, if a mediator is closer to one side than to another side? Is that a problem? Is it a problem if mediators have interests? I once asked that question when I was in the State Department and was told we didn't have any interest, you wouldn't be doing this, would you? So there are ways you can frame that question. The next question is, is it possible for the US political system to walk and chew gum, to take on a case that may have multiple dimensions, to take on a conflict which is part of a bigger conflict, which is buried in a bigger conflict? And of course that was clearly the case of the Israel Syria file, but it's also the case of the Balkan file that Dan Sir will talk about. It's a case of Yemen which Barbara will talk about. It's a case of Colombia which Bernie Aronson will be talking about in different ways, in different respects. And then my final question is for everybody, what is the secret to achieving coherence in the US government's executive branch? Is there any way to do it? Is there any way to do it? Because without it, the mediator who works for the US government has kind of a problem. And of course that question could be asked about the UN system or any other country system. So the question there is about coherence. So Fred, I'm going to start with you now. You describe in your book that at a certain point there was what you call a gold-plated Lexus. The gold-plated Lexus is the ideal vehicle that anybody would want to own. And for the Israelis it's completely transforming Syrian foreign policy and for the Syrians it's getting back the Golan Heights. And you developed a framework of principles, territory and security principles. So my question is how difficult would it have been in your judgment to translate that framework of principles into an actual peace treaty? And what would have been the major obstacles along the way? So that's an opening question. I have a few others, but that's I think a very important one because Fred takes us right to the point where you can sense that there's a striker in front of the goal. But what's not done yet is the writing of a detailed agreement. And what would have been the problems of getting to a detailed agreement? Would it have been about territory, about borders? Would it have been about the sequencing of steps, about the timing of Israeli withdrawal? How do you see that issue? Had you gotten a chance to kick the ball into the net? Well, thanks, Chet. I'll make every effort to answer that question even accurately. First, let me say thanks to all of you who have showed up today for this program. I'm deeply honored. Thank you to the U.S. Institute of Peace for publishing the book, putting on this program. And I must say it's a bit daunting for me to be in the company of the likes of Barbara Bodine and Bernie Aronson, Dan Serwer, Chet Crocker. I'm acutely aware of the fact that what distinguishes my efforts from those that you've made down through the years is that you all managed to succeed. And I didn't. On the question, we actually in the second half of 2010 achieved a bit of a breakthrough with the parties when the Israelis, in the person of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Syrians and the person of President Bashar al-Assad, agreed that the way forward for this mediation would be for me to draft a treaty of peace. And I, with the help of Dennis Ross, I drafted a treaty of peace and spent several months shuttling it back and forth between Damascus and Jerusalem. I made it clear to both parties that this was my paper. We called it, I think, a discussion paper. I would accept changes that I would think the other side could live with. And this process was moving ahead quite well. As it turned out, the Syrian side wanted the discussions on this paper to focus more on the territorial issue than anything else. I mean, this was the Syrian goal to recover all of the territory every single inch that had been lost to Israel in June 1967. The Israelis after a while, particularly Prime Minister Netanyahu, were getting a bit nervous about this. I mean, Bebe was saying, you know, we're being very forthcoming on territory. I mean, we had gotten to the point where the only issue really in dispute was where the boundary line would be in relation to the upper Jordan River flowing into the Sea of Galilee. The point was, Fred, where is Assad on his deliverable, which is strategic reorientation. In other words, Syria would be required to break military and security relationships with Iran, Hezbollah, and at the time Hamas. This led to a one-on-one meeting that I had with Assad last day of February 2011 in which we went in detail what Syria would have to do to recover its territory eventually. And Assad was very forthcoming. So we had a document that ideally would have gotten to the point where both sides agreed on every word and every punctuation mark in which case it would have been their document, it would have been their treaty of peace. We never got there because of the decision of the Syrian government to basically wage war on its own people. So there you have it. There was a Lexus, it was available on the parking lot, and all that you had to do was to get your version on paper accepted, modified, adapted as necessary by the parties, and you would think you would have had a treaty. And if I could say one word about your initial question, you know, mastering the brief, I attempt to teach a course in diplomacy at Bard College in upstate New York, and I've given the students a list of things that I've learned over the years, lessons learned from the occasional success and the many failures, but lesson number one, master the brief. Do the homework. It's absolutely essential. My ability to get anywhere with these parties was premised on the proposition, and they recognized that I probably knew more, at least about the territorial aspects of an eventual settlement than they did. So that, you know, that gave me some credibility with the two sides that was remarkable and enabled them to agree. And I think for Bibi Netanyahu this was extraordinary because this guy has never, ever, ever wanted the United States to put a piece of paper on the table to agree that I should draft a treaty of peace and shuttle it back and forth. Next question, the Washington problem. You write in several places that there was something called an overpopulated and self-important NSC staff. Who would have thunk? And it wasn't, of course, just that. There was lots of wires and potential micromanagers of these files related to Israel's Syria peace. There was Senator Kerry, there was Secretary Clinton, President Obama, Special Envoy George Mitchell. You relied heavily on the partnership that you had with Dennis Ross, which was really, really key. There were also some people in the NSC system, Tom Donlon and Dennis McDonough. And I guess I have two questions. What would have happened if you had come back to Washington one or two times more and asked these key players if they had a clue what you were doing and supported it? Because as you make clear at the end of your book, and it's so self-revealing and so interesting for someone like myself to read, quote, I never convinced anyone that the Israel-Syria peace was manifestly in the best interests of the United States. In retrospect, I can see that neither Damascus nor Jerusalem, I'm quoting here, was the first target to address. It was Washington. So what's the lesson here? The lesson is come back to Washington more often. Is the lesson to quit if you don't have Washington support? Is the lesson to challenge the superiors by saying, back me up or I'm out of here? I mean, you know, what is the exit, the power of exit? I think it's an important question for us all to understand that if you don't have air cover, it's hard to be a mediator. Yeah, and it may be all of the above yet, but you know, for me the main lesson was know at least as much about the home team as you do about the parties you're mediating between. I felt very, very comfortable. I almost felt as if I was in command during the mediation itself. I was living the dream. This is something I had been thinking about for years, writing about for years, and now I was getting a chance to do it. I did this job as a deputy to former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who was a special envoy for Middle East peace. Mitchell was concentrating his efforts almost exclusively on the Israel-Palestinian track. And as time went on, I mean at first, at the beginning of the Obama administration, George Mitchell had virtually a blank check from the president. The president I think was a little bit in awe of George Mitchell and his work on Ireland and baseball steroids and all that. Disney Corporation. Over time, this overpopulated NSC staff really began to dig into George Mitchell's work. And it was making him crazy. They were giving him rudder direction at every conceivable point. I avoided this entirely. I think the White House thought that the chances of a Syria-Israel peace virtually nil. This is not likely to happen. I was left alone. I never had to go through this purgatory of having my every move microanalyzed and micromanaged. Then in the end, when I was reporting breakthroughs from both Damascus and Jerusalem, one of the things I noticed after a few days was there was no response from the White House. And I mean it's not as if you have the appearance of Middle East peace breakthroughs every 20 minutes. It struck me that this was fairly important, but the silence from the White House was deafening. And it was almost as if what the hell has this guy Hough been doing? So there seems to not have been much interest in Syria-Israel peace, despite the President's verbal commitment to comprehensive Middle Eastern peace. And indeed when the shooting started in Syria, Dennis Ross and I talked about it. Dennis went to the President and said, please, Mr. President, pick up the phone, call Assad. It may not work. But at least make it clear to him that if the shooting does not stop, this promising mediation is finished. President refused to do it. Ross asked, hey, how about sending Fred back to speak with Assad again? No to that? Can we give Ambassador Ford in Damascus the requisite talking points to go in to speak with Assad? No. So at the end of all of this, as I was reflecting on it and writing the book, I thought this is perhaps my greatest failure. I had the luxury of no interagency interference in my mediation, but it was a false luxury. I would have been better off going through the process and making sure the home team was fully on board with what I was doing. You mentioned at the end of the book that the lack of support and the unwillingness of the President to pick up the phone and call Assad was, and I quote, a gratuitous lapse in responsible statecraft, implying that you think it might have made a difference. And so just on that one point, would it have made a difference? Yeah, my own assessment at the time, Shet, was that there was probably less than a 50-50 chance of Assad actually reacting the way I would hope he would have reacted. How much lower than 50%, I don't know. I'm not in a position to know. But I thought at the very least, we need to make an effort here, not only to save a promising mediation, but to stop the shooting. People were being killed. And even within a few weeks into this, April 2011, it was becoming clear that unless somebody stopped this process, Syria could be on the fast track to disaster and state failure. Ten years from now, 11 years from then, it's pretty clear here we are. Thank you very much, Fred. You may have more opportunity to jump in here as we go along. I'm going to turn to Barbara and ask you, Barbara, Ambassador Boudin. Yes, sir. I have a question for you about Yemen. But drawing lessons from what we've just been talking about in the case of Israel and Syria, I'm going to ask you this question. Was Yemen a primary focus of diplomacy in the Middle East? Is it now? Or is it, in fact, a subsidiary issue in a larger game or a larger negotiation? And what do you have to conclude about that situation? Should one focus on Yemen as a target of opportunity for a mediator? People like, for example, Martin Griffiths, the UN mediator there for a while. Does it make sense to focus on one piece of a bigger conflict? Or do you have to start with the bigger conflict as a way to get into the one piece? What's the sequence here? That's a nice, simple, straightforward question. I can do this. The answer to do you start small and work out or start out and work in is probably yes. I think particularly in the case of Yemen, it is such a compounded, complex conflict. Yes, Israel, Syria is part of a broader Middle East, but to a certain extent you can deal with it separately. George can work on Palestine, you can work on Syria, and then the hope is you can bring it together. With Yemen, you have an indigenous civil war, a very, almost classic civil war, but on top of that you have the regional engagement and the different regional powers backing different sides of this civil war and making it even more complex. To actually take it down one more level, even within Yemen it's not a nice two-sided civil war. Long time ago I was at something and someone said, well, who are the good guys and the bad guys? And the answer was it's just a whole lot of guys with guns. So if you just work on the Yemen internal issues, which you have to get to at some point, but you don't bring in the Saudis, the Emirates, the Iranians who have clear interest and agendas that are both Yemen-centric and regional, nothing is going to happen. To turn it around, if you were just simply to go to Riyadh, Tehran, or Oman, who was ever fronting for Iran for us now, and Abu Dhabi and just have them come up with a solution, it's not going to stick because the Yemenis don't have any ownership. And so what you're doing is playing a multi-level chess game where you need to work with the Saudis, Iranians, and Emirates to get them to understand that this war is not in their interest at all, is not going to get solved militarily. They have to buy into peace and then work with their various components and then let the components work. I haven't even gone beyond to where the U.S., the U.K. and China and several others are, thank God we don't have the Russians involved as far as I know, do we have the Russians? Okay, good, we don't have the Russians involved. This makes the role of both the UN envoy and now the U.S. envoy really one of trying to get two sides, three sides, six sides, 12 sides, all to understand that we've got to get this conflict ended. It is the worst humanitarian crisis anywhere. It is the largest famine anywhere. It is the worst anything anywhere. But to really go to them and it's their interest. In terms of where the U.S. is on this, I think it's important and this kind of goes a little bit to what Fred was talking about, is how important is it to the U.S. government? And this is also your question about agendas and interests. Whatever my connections with Yemen, I don't have any misconceptions about. It is not critically important in and of itself, regrettably. It is always a proxy and it's always been a proxy. To the extent that we didn't care we weren't engaged, particularly under the Trump administration but also Obama, it was a sideshow, nothing moved. The current administration did come in and said that Yemen was initially one of its highest foreign policy strategic interests, which was an astounding statement. It wasn't unfortunately again Yemen per se. It was our relationship with Saudi Arabia. It was our ability to work with Iran on the JCPOA 2.0. It was the importance of the Emirates as a strategic partner that our interest in the broader peninsula and the broader Persian Gulf, getting those tensions, those conflicts under control and managed, necessitated getting the Yemen conflict under control. Working on Yemen could also be a gateway to try to get the Saudi-Iranian thing under control. So it has never been Yemen-centric. It can't be regional. I will say that, and I think this is again to go to Fred's frustration, when the Biden administration said Yemen is critically important, everyone understood it was really because Saudi is important, Iran is important, things have started to change. Our engagement has, we have a truce that's just been extended. So the frustration that you had with not being able to get attention on a piece of a broader regional issue, I think the lesson learned from that on the positive is seeing what has happened when the Biden administration said, this conflict, this region, the subsidiary interests all come together. We've got to fix this if we're going to fix that. Thank you very much, Barbara. You've answered all the questions that I had for you in one answer. Sorry about that. I can expand. Well, I was wondering if you would give a B or a B plus or an A minus to the international effort on Yemen, because you do teach. I know you teach. Yes, I do. Yes, I do teach. So yes, I'm very good at grading. I would give this administration and the current UN Special Envoy, who has done extraordinarily good jobs. Right now it's an incomplete, but on their midterm, which is the truce and the extension of the truce, on their midterm I would say they have a strong B plus, maybe even A minus, so they can pull this one out. A year ago, I would have suggested they withdraw from the course. Well, that sums it up. Do we go to Bernie now? Can we go to Bernie? We can. Is Bernie Aronson on the line? I see you there, Bernie. Hello. Can you hear me? We can hear you. That's great. Bernie, I think everybody on the program knows who you are in your distinguished public service, as well as your private sector experience. You played a key role at different times on both the Central American peace process, but also the Colombian peace process where you had a key role as a kind of, how should I put it, indirect special envoy mediator slash diplomat. And I'm wondering if you would answer this question to start us out. Did you ever have a Washington problem? No. I actually had a Washington advantage because President Santos, President Colombia, asked both President Obama and Secretary Kerry for the U.S. to get more involved in the process. They were kind of stuck on most of the key issues, the hard issues, demobilization, security, political participation, transition of justice. And so part of my being asked by the President and the Secretary to take on this role was in response to a request from a close ally and friend, the President of Colombia. And secondly, I had an advantage in that this, the current Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere was Reverend Jacobson, who worked for me 20 years earlier when I was Assistant Secretary and our Ambassador in Colombia, Kevin Whitaker, who did a terrific job, also worked for me back then. He was my Salvadorian desk office. So, you know, part of the complication sometimes of having a special envoy is that the existing team, you know, has some resentment that this person has parachuted in and suddenly is running around, you know, doing things. And I'm not saying there wasn't any, you know, working out some issues, tensions or whatever, but remarkably, we were one team and because we've worked together, you know, that was not a negative in my account. And the White House had bought into this and the CIA had bought into this, but they didn't really spend a lot of time bothering me. I mean, they were pretty solicitous and I had a lot of running work. So that was a nice environment to be part of. Thank you. That's a very encouraging story and it's encouraging for all the future mediators in this room to know that it sometimes works because you have air cover at the top and the air cover, in fact, made it possible for you to have the running room you would need to get a lot of things done, a lot of things which you didn't necessarily take personal credit for, but which unfolded in a positive way in the Colombian peace process. Thinking back to Fred Hof's book, he talks a lot about the framework of principles that he developed. I'm wondering in Colombia who developed a framework of principles. It's one of the most complicated peace processes I've ever seen. It has chapter after chapter after chapter and you sort of wondered do all these parts fit together or are they linked to each other? So who developed that framework in the Colombian case? Did you do it? Is it your fault? Or was it somebody else? The Colombians were very wise because there have been three previous attempts to negotiate ends of this war, which was a terribly bloody, terribly destructive war that had gone on for literally 50 years. And so President Santos started this with secret negotiations and it was outside of the public and knowledge meant so nobody could pay the camera. And they negotiated for well over a year, maybe close to two, a framework that would govern the process. And it wasn't so much about process, but about substance. They had defined the agenda of issues that had to be resolved. And they also defined the issues or the interests that were not going to be touched. In other words, the armed forces were not going to be a subject of this negotiation. Politically, President Santos couldn't have gotten going forward if that was the case. So only, they only went public when the framework was done. It was agreed upon. But it also, the process of creating the framework was a bit of a confidence builder because it never got out in the public, which of course, you know, if it does in a situation like that, it's so much harder people start throwing rocks and then you get defensive and all the like. So one further question for you, Bernie, before I turn to Dan Serwer. And that is the relationship between the U.S. government and the U.N. system in the case of Salvador peace process, the Central American process, which you were also involved in as a system secretary. So how did that work? Was that an easy relationship or was it a mess? And how did you sort it? Well, the good news is, is that the mediator was able to push the parties forward and institutionalize the process. But the government of Salvador, under President Cristiani, definitely felt the mediator was biased and I think there's some truth to that. So that was a problem. And second of all, he didn't use leverage and pressure sometimes when he could to create a deadline and force the parties to come together. All in all, it was good to have a mediator because it also allowed the Security Council to embrace this process and create a lot of international support. And that's a very important dynamic I don't know if it's relevant to diplomacy and Syria, but when you're dealing with insurgents, guerrillas who spent 40 years in the bush and lived this life of violence, suddenly they're brought up to the highest pinnacles of power and prestige and Secretary General is meeting with them, it's a state of meeting with them and they get put on this platform and you kind of create some pressure. First of all, they like it. They like being treated that way. Second of all, it's a lot safer to go to the UN and climb around the jungle of Colombia waiting for bombs to fall on you. So it was rocky and we had to do a lot of things behind the scenes to make it work and make him succeed. But that agreement was a profoundly transformative agreement as far as human rights and the treatment of the army. So yeah, we paid a price and it was complicated, but in the end it was more plus than negative. Thank you very much, Bernie, for those first-hand experiences from your own career. I'm going to turn now to Dan Surwer whose experience in the Balkans is really quite stunning. You became a specialist in building something called the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a complex entity which became later a constituent part of an even more complex entity. Your excellent chapter in a book published by USIP in 1999 called Herding Katz, which was co-edited by myself and my fiance Pamela All, who's in the audience up there, reveals much about the region and about relations with Washington and the Allies. So I'm going to ask Dan to start with because I know he has some views about this, whether he had a Washington problem and whether there was any issue of subsidiarity or of tail wagging dog or dog wagging tail in your effort to build that Federation. Yes, I had a Washington problem, but I also had a Washington solution who was the same thing. It was Dick Holbrook. And Dick Holbrook's way of providing top cover was to scare the living daylights out of everybody he encountered. He was not a master of the details. He did not, I'm going to get in trouble for saying this in public, he did not know the brief well. But he had delegated to him at a moment that is now known as the unipolar moment when the United States could do anything it wanted in the world, especially when it came to countries of 2, 3, 4 million people. So he would scare everybody off. And really when I was given the Federation to deal with as Fred was given the Syria-Israel negotiation, people backed me up on the Federation. There was never any doubt that it was vital to American interests because we couldn't negotiate peace in Bosnia as a three-party problem. It was too complicated. It had to be reduced to two parties. And the way to do that was to consolidate the Federation. That said, you know, I was in Bosnia a lot. And when you're not in Washington, you get blamed for a lot of stuff. In fact, at one point, one of my friends in the administration in the State Department said to me, you're serving a very useful function. Everybody blames you for anything that goes wrong in Bosnia. So yes, I had a problem. But so far as interference from the NSC or from other agencies of the government was concerned, very little under the circumstances. But then again, my portfolio was not as prominent as Fred's was, frankly. I was dealing with Ida Begovic. I was dealing with Tudjman. But it wasn't the first thing on their minds by any means. Should you know your brief well? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that the guy at the top has to know it, as well as you do. The guy at the top has other responsibilities, one of which is to provide top cover. And you know, I don't really fault Dick for being, as one of his colleagues put it, impressionistic about words on paper, speaking of, you know, getting the details right. One thing I would say about Fred's book that's very similar to the Balkans is that you needed a framework for the negotiation. And Dick generated that in a series of meetings before Dayton, not at Dayton. You generated it from something Senator Kerry did. It strikes me that you did something very ingenious and something American diplomats don't do often enough, which is to enlist the Congress in support of what you're doing. The State Department is notoriously suspicious of the Congress and doesn't like any contacts with the Congress, except through the legislative bureau, which is a disaster, of course. It never has been very good and never will be because it doesn't know the issues. So I think that parallel is very important. You need a negotiating framework that both sides are bought into. Thank you, Dan. It sounds like you had the air cover you need in some respects. Did you get the boundaries drawn the way you wanted them between the Federation and the rest of the neighborhood out there? I had a look at your chapter recently. I seem to recall that there were one or two issues that you were interfered with by somebody. I don't know who it was. I was essentially opposed to the formula of the Dayton Agreement. The basic formula in the Dayton Agreement is two entities, single country, each entity highly autonomous. And that failed to fulfill the bottom line requirements of the people we supported in that war, which was the Karat Muslim Federation. When I asked the commander of the Bosnian Army what was his war aim, I'd been told by the CIA that his war aim was to conquer 100% of the territory. And that's not what he said. He looked at me and said, President Izabegovitch has told me to fight until 100% of displaced people and refugees can go home. And that's quite a different war aim. And that was their aim at Dayton as well. And they got it. Sometimes people wonder why there's always provision for displaced people and refugees to vote and that kind of thing in the Dayton Agreements. It's because that was the essential war aim of the Bosnian Army. He got it in name, but we all knew it would not work in practice. And some of us did object to the Dayton formula and then I had real problems with Washington. Well, thank you very much, Dan. Do we have any questions from the floor that might be questions from the audience first or questions from the audience to Fred Hoff or any of the other panelists if there are questions here? There's a good question that's just come up about the importance of personalities. Did personalities ever get in the way between the Israelis and the Syrians? Was there a personality issue there? Sure, there are inevitably personality issues. On the Israeli side, you've mentioned Senator Kerry. Kerry had had a meeting in Damascus with Assad and Foreign Minister Walid Mualim. Kerry was in Damascus at the behest of the president to talk about Syrian support for Hezbollah and Syrian support for terrorists joining Al-Qaeda in Iraq moving across. Kerry shared with me an interest in Syria-Israel peace and he raised peace with Assad. And at the end of a couple of days of discussions, they produced a piece of paper unsigned but with Assad basically acknowledging if he gets his territory back eventually, all of it, he's willing to change relationships in the region so that there would be absolutely no threat to the state of Israel. Trying to convince BB Netanyahu that this was worth testing was the devil's own work. I mean, it was very, very, very difficult. Dennis Ross suggested that I meet with Netanyahu personally. This is something that George Mitchell had not wanted me to do because Mitchell was really focused on Israelis, Palestinians. He was afraid of a distraction. He was worried about that. Went to see Netanyahu with Ross. We had a couple of very long discussions. BB was very, very skeptical of the whole thing but he eventually agreed to give it a try in the form of the discussion paper, the draft treaty, which I put together. The Syrian side, I thought the main personality difficulty, as I reflected on my one-on-one meeting with Assad in February 2011, Assad assured me without qualification that the Iranians, Hezbollah, any other enemy of the state of Israel would fall right into line. Once he announced that there was going to be a peace treaty with Israel, I was surprised when he said that. And to this day, I don't know if he really believed it or not, it's the one thing where I came away from that meeting feeling not really good. Everything else Assad acknowledged precisely what would have to be done. But on this, his assessment of how the Iranians and Hezbollah would have reacted to being sidelined, to losing their military and security relationships with Syria. If this process had continued, if Syria had not dissolved into violence, to me this would have been the most interesting question on the Syrian side. If Assad actually decided to go through with all of this, would he have survived the process? Thank you very much, Fred. I think we're just about at, do we have a question, two from the floor? I see one hand here and another hand there and there. So let's take three quick questions and then we'll kick them around up here. Starting over here. Yeah. Hello, everybody. Ruan Escobar. Hey, Bernie. Hey, Fred, Barbara. Nice to see you guys chat. One of the things that really struck me about the Columbia peace talks was the timing. Timing was so essential. You know, Bernie got named in January, by February or early March. He got named in January in Columbia and there was a sort of escalation of violence that started. And I think Bernie played a really important role in trying to de-escalate what was turning into a pretty serious issue. And I look at, Fred, I look at Syria and I wonder how important the timing could have been in that scenario. Had the talks started a little bit before, that happened a little bit later, would that have given you the space, do you think, to maybe get in there and then would that having peace so close at hand or at hand maybe been enough, do you think, for Assad to reconsider the path that he eventually went down? Thank you for that. Let's hold the question and then we'll take another couple. We had one here and one there. Yeah. Microphone's coming to you. I'd be curious what the panel thinks Saudi Arabia's role would be in mediating any future Middle Eastern conflicts. I know it has its own interests and we have a close relationship with the Saudis in some respects. I'm curious what the panel thinks. Thank you. And right here. So this question is specifically Barbara. I was wondering if you can expand more on Chinese and British involvement with the situation in Yemen. Chinese? Yes, and British. As you mentioned in your response about Yemen, would you mind expanding on that? Okay. So we have a couple of questions. One on timing and then several related ones directed to you, Barbara. Okay. So do you want to comment on timing? Yeah, just very briefly on the timing issue. Yeah, I think this was one of my failures. It was inadvertent. I wish I had taken the initiative to engage Netanyahu much earlier in the process. I have a sense that if where we were in March 2011 had actually been achieved in the fall of 2010 that Assad's decision making process in reacting to things on the ground in Syria might have been different. We might also have been at the point in the spring of 2011 of being able to announce something which might have enabled the Syrian people to have a bit more patience in their leader thinking that well, perhaps if there's going to be peace with Israel perhaps this regime can actually turn a corner in its methodologies and its handling or mishandling of the economy and all of that. So yeah, I think the timing was in retrospect quite important. Barbara. Yeah. I'm still not... I know you said China. I just want to be sure that I didn't lose another thing under the mask. Yeah. Well, the U.K. is one of the... was a major weapons supplier as well as having long-standing relations. So they have the complicity issue that we face with our military support to the Saudi Emirati military action. They haven't... Even though Martin Griffith was one of the special envoys, the British government hasn't been as engaged. So I'm just going to put them aside as one of the suppliers. The Chinese have made, you know, the noises that they tend to make about being good mediators and helping negotiate, but they don't have a chat ask about mediators having agendas and interests. They may have an agenda. They don't really have interests, and they don't have a kind of traditional connections in the region. They also have some... some interests that kind of run... could be complicating. They're very dependent on Gulf oil, and so they're not going to do anything that is going to necessarily get them cross ways with Saudis, Emiratis, and others, those oil interests, those energy interests are too great. There's some chatter that they have some interest in expanding the Belt and Road, Adenport, all of that. If they go after Adenport as part of the Belt and Road, they're going to be coming straight up against Emirati interests, which have been extraordinarily focused on securing sea lanes, particularly but not solely Aden. And so I think that they would have to push back against the Emirati. They're not a major player. They never were, and I don't see them being a player in any kind of a peace process, or even, perhaps, in reconstruction. The question about the Saudis being a player in the peace process, the traditional definition of the peace process was always Israel, Palestine, and its immediate neighbors. That was always Dennis Ross's and everyone else's peace process. We have a new peace process that we're dealing with called the Abraham Accords, which is focused on almost everything in the region except the Palestinians. And it really is an interest. It's a question of some strategic interests, Iran, some economic interests, particularly technical, between Israel and the Emiratis. But it is not a peace process in the conventional sense of the word. Interestingly, and everyone who signed up for the Abraham Accords, which is tremendously pretentious name, there was a real quick pro quo. This was done under the previous administration that was big on the art of the deal. So the Emiratis have a relationship with Israel, which they've had for a very long time. And they end up with a whole bunch of Israeli tourists, which is always nice, and hopefully some whiz-bangy airplanes. The Sudanese get off the terrorism list. The Moroccans get us to recognize their claim to Western Sahara. Everybody is getting these very, very quick pro quo. The Saudi quick pro quo has always been the holy sites, Jerusalem. And that's one where the Israelis have a lot less to give. The Saudis did get kind of involved in peace process, conventional sense. In 2004, with the Abdullah Plan, which stated very explicitly, agreed unanimously by all members of the Arab League when the Arab League existed, that any accord that the Palestinians agreed to with Israel would automatically bring recognition from all of the Arab states. And included, and that was going to have to be something on Jerusalem. That's been sitting there for 20 years and nothing's ever happened. What was interesting about the Abraham Accords, particularly the Emirati part, is that they had a complete agreement and nobody mentioned Jerusalem, nobody mentioned Palestinians, nobody mentioned the immediate peace conflict issue. The Saudis have been noticeably quiet on Abraham. What exactly President Biden is up to in talking to the Israelis and talking to the Saudis, this is probably going to be part of it. It's also going to be Iran. It's also going to be Yemen. I don't see Saudis leaning into something as fraught as a real peace agreement that not only takes care of the Palestinian problem, but has to deal with that Jerusalem holy site issue. And that is such a key part of the Saudi government's legitimacy that it's not the same thing as an airplane or Western Sahara are getting off the terrorism list. So they will have the Emiratis lead, there may be others who lead. This is not something the Saudis are not going to be the first ones out there and they're not going to be the pushers. They're going to be followers. Would you agree, Fred? Thank you, Barbara. We'll have to tune in again after the President comes back from his visits in the area. Do we have an event planned for a couple of weeks from now, Leeds? We can come back to this one. We can title it how wrong Barbara was. Thanks. Excuse me, I have to go. Can I have any more questions? I'll see you guys later. Can I comment on the bias question quickly? Yeah, sure. But let's just, I want to see how many questions we have. We have one, two, three. Okay, go ahead. On the bias question, you know, it's generally what seems right is that a mediator should be unbiased and neutral or impartial, something like that. But I think in all the cases we're talking about, it's actually vital that the mediator was biased. And why? I think Barbara Walters' work on negotiations ignites us quite a bit on this subject. A power negotiator, one with a bias and resources, has the possibility of guaranteeing the implementation of the outcome. And that's vital in the negotiation process, not only in the implementation process. So in Syria, for example, the United States was going to have a separate agreement with Israel. In Bosnia, we gave train and equip to the Bosniaks in order to make them sign on to the date and agreement. Bernie's here to talk about Columbia, but I certainly as a third party didn't see us as impartial in Columbia. I don't think we're really impartial in Yemen either. We recognize the government there. So I think this idea that impartiality is important may apply to some mediators, in particular UN mediators, although even there there's a problem because UN has a bias towards sovereign states. But in the particular cases we're talking about, I don't see how success could come about without a really solid resourceful mediator. Thank you for that comment. It's one that I might mention again in the sum up. But let's see if we have a few questions. In the back of the room is a question and there's a microphone coming to you. Please state your question. Hi there. Thank you so much Steven Dreyer at the State Department. I have a question for you Ambassador Hoff but would be interested in the other panelists' responses as well. I must confess I only just received your book last night and so I've only just started to dig into it. But in the book you reference the Syrians' demand for a deposit and I haven't seen how that resolves itself later in the book or if it resolves itself. My question is essentially what do you do when neither party wants to make the first move in a negotiation? Okay, let's take a couple of questions and then we'll circle back. Other hands up right here. Tom Martin from the State Department. I guess my first question is for Dr. Sivar. Did I understand correctly and maybe I didn't that the CIA believed that Itzabagavitch wanted to retake all of Bosnia? Okay, that strikes me as a little bit bizarre that Itzabagavitch didn't have that kind of capability, did he? And what would you do and what did you do when you were confronted with something that was so wrong? Where did you go with that and how do you do that in such a way as not to wrinkle a lot of feathers? And my second question is for Dr. Hoff. When did you realize that the game had changed in Syria? Was it when the bullets began to fly and that you're gonna have to kind of pick up your tent and go home or was there still a little bit of life left in this thing that says maybe we can still negotiate and get this thing through even though it's going to hell in a handbasket? Thank you. Is there another one up there? One more up there and then we'll circle around. Thank you very much for this fascinating discussion so far. I'm a Council on Foreign Relations fellow at the State Department. My question is, I have two questions actually. The first is to what extent in Colombia how important was it to have information on ceasefire violations, for example, given that you were dealing with an armed conflict that had happened, as you mentioned, had been going on for decades? How important was it to have kind of valid or accurate information about ceasefire violations that were happening from both sides given that often in these types of armed conflicts you have very different narratives about the nature of the conflict? The second is we've talked about Syria in the early period of the conflict but I'm curious to know what any of the panelists would recommend we do now in the Syrian conflict. We used to have a US special envoy to Syria. We no longer do. We have the UN special envoy still but no longer an American special envoy for Syria. What would you advise, especially given repeated threats to launch another Turkish incursion into Syria and the possibility for further mass displacement? Thank you. Very interesting questions there. And there's one that I think is particularly important that relates to the issue of implementation and how do you deal with people who don't live up to their terms? What do you do about violators? Should we start? Bernie, you had a question directed to you. Did you hear it okay? Yes, I think so. I'm monitoring ceasefire. And I'd like to speak slightly to that point that you just raised but we were not operating on your ceasefire. It's a very interesting negotiation. President Sanders actually quoted Yitzhak Levine on his famous we're going to fight as if there is no peace process and we're going to negotiate as if there's no terrorism and war. And that's a judgment that each mediator or whoever has to make which is is a ceasefire in their interest or not. President Sanders believed because there was some history of this in Colombia that if you have a ceasefire it weakens the government and the guerrillas take advantage of that. And in fact that had happened 10 years earlier under President Pastrana where he negotiated a piece of Colombia the size of Switzerland and allowed the guerrillas to go there as a confidence building measure. Of course what the guerrillas did is they don't airstrips to bring in coca leaves and put their kidnapped victims. So that discredited that. So Santos did not even have a and did not agree to a ceasefire. It didn't mean that there weren't some monitoring because we had some incidents where the parties clashed and we had to walk back a potential crisis. But in the case of Colombia the ceasefire was not agreed on until the end of the process and even then it took a long time to demobilize. Thank you Bernie. There is a quite lively debate in the literature of mediation about whether ceasefires are good or not and do they create a kind of opportunity to build incrementally or do they in fact encourage the parties to rearm and reorganize and get ready for the next round of fighting. It's a standard argument and I think the probable answer to that is that it depends. It also depends on when you implement the ceasefire. You know in Salvador the ceasefire didn't come until an awful lot had been settled and negotiated and there was more security for the guerrillas. But in the case of Colombia there wasn't enough trust between the parties to have a ceasefire. Dan you got a question about the CIA. Yeah it's not only a question. Are we all cleared for this conversation? I guess we are. It's not only a question about the CIA. It's a question about American perceptions more generally. Even in October of 1994 when I took on the Federation job support for the Federation I asked Dick Holbrook is the Federation, are we aiming for the Federation to be 51% of Bosnia and Herzegovina as the contact group had decided or 100% of Bosnia and Herzegovina as frankly we would have preferred. And Dick's answer was it depends. Depends on the circumstances. In fact the circumstances have to be understood. I had mentioned earlier that I didn't like the date and agreement partly because of 5149 split. Split which had been agreed but never written down and which was the product of a different set of circumstances on the ground. By the time of the ceasefire that preceded Dayton the Federation controlled 67% of the territory. So at Dayton what we did was to roll them back from 67% to 51%. Could they have ever conquered the entire territory? Not the Bosnian army alone but the Bosnian army and the Croats. The answer is they wouldn't have because they would go to Britsko and there are no Croats past Britsko and therefore the Croat Defense Force Croatian army wouldn't have fought past Britsko. That would have been a very different circumstance in which to settle the war. I think a preferable circumstance but I didn't win that argument. Fred you had a question about how to fix Syria today. Do you have a short answer to that one? Syria is not fixable in the near term for sure. There are no silver bullets. There's no magic fairy dust that's going to rescue this country and restore legitimate governance or establish legitimate governance anytime soon. I'm very concerned about parent Russian veto. I don't know if something's going to be worked out here. Blocking the United Nations from using a crossing point from Turkey and Northwest Syria for humanitarian supplies. I recommended several months ago in an article and I've spoken with friends in government that the United States, the country that successfully executed the 1948 Berlin airlift be prepared to do a Syria land lift of humanitarian supplies in case the United Nations finds itself put out of business. I would be delighted to learn that the requisite planning has taken place and that we're prepared to execute. I'd be delighted. I'd also be a bit surprised. There was one question about what do you do when neither party wants to take the first step? The traditional Syrian position on negotiating with Israel has been, and this goes back to 1993, that Israel should deposit with the United States, with the U.S. President. It's acknowledgement that the negotiation will be about the terms and conditions of Syria recovering all of the territory lost in June 1967. Syria has not been the least bit interested in discussing partial withdrawal, partial recovery of territory, but this is the meaning of this term deposit. This is the Syrian precondition, if you will, for negotiations to take place. Israel has traditionally, well, Rabin went along with it after a struggle. Other Israeli prime ministers have been reluctant to do it. For Bibi Netanyahu, the answer was just no, and I pounded away at this for the better part of a year, and the answer was no, no, no, no. The way we move forward was for the mediator in this case to propose a way to get around it, and this was the drafting of a treaty of peace, and this was acceptable to both sides, and we were moving along at a good clip when things were interrupted by Syrian violence. When did I think the game changed? Hard to put a specific date to it. Let's say that sometime by late April, early May of 2011, when I was absorbing the fact that my own government was not going to try to intervene with Assad to try to dissuade him from continuing violence, I had come to the conclusion by then that this was not going to stop and that Assad was sacrificing his own political legitimacy, his own ability to speak for Syrians on matters of war and peace. There was never any formal consultation between us and the Israeli, I think we both, we and the Israelis came to the conclusion that Assad has taken this totally off the rails and there's no way this is going to be walked back. So I think by May 1, 2011, something like that, I realized it was over. Thank you, Fred. The word preconditions or conditions has been thrown around a lot in this conversation, and of course, as soon as one side in the conflict says that I'm prepared to make all kinds of steps but I have a precondition, the other side has to move first on something. As soon as you hear that, you realize that the party who just said that is not serious. What you have to do is turn it around and say, well, the other side might have a condition. So how about if we just took our conditions and put them in a table in parallel and we could just look at the conditions and see and then the mediator steps forward and says, well, maybe we can draft something and we can get some kind of parallel movement. I did a lot of work in Southern Africa and worked for a boss by the name at one point of Al Haig, and we were trying to figure out the relationship between the independence of Namibia on the one hand, independence from South Africa and the withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola where they were next door. Ultimately, that was the principles that led to the deal in 1988. But Al Haig had a wonderful command of language and he was asked at a press conference once, well, so Secretary Haig, what exactly is the relationship here between, when did the Cubans have to leave and when did the South Africans have to leave and how do we know, you know, how the timetable is going to work and his answer was, we need to have a substantial measure of empirical simultaneity. I spent about seven or eight years of my life trying to figure out what the hell that meant and turned the principles into a deal at the end. I think we have a question in the back of the room from Pamela All. Is she there? Does she have a microphone? This may be our last question. Well, thank you very much. This has been really interesting and I will make it short. We talked about interference, lack of support or support from the home office. In our day and age, we are dealing with highly polarized politics and I wonder what your thoughts are, you know, all four of you now, on how this will have an impact on our ability to use our diplomacy for peacemaking going forward. Thanks for that easy one, as we are running short on time here, but domestic polarization at home and its impact on the ability of our own country, the U.S., to be effective in peacemaking. The art of making peace requires that you have a solid interagency, that you have air cover, that you have a boss who may or may not be too steeped in the issues. That was another lovely phrase of Al Haig. He went to brief President Reagan on what we were doing in Africa and he came back and he said, Chet, the President is not really steeped in the issues. I thought to myself, but, you know, can we do it today in the same way we could do it in an earlier age? Is it possible for our country to negotiate on a bipartisan basis? For example, right now in Ukraine, the President's been doing what he can to line up support on both sides of the aisle and it's a very demanding challenge, a very important challenge. What do you guys think? Is it possible today? I think it's become more difficult. I think the election of Donald Trump in particular and his radical change of policy towards NATO, for example, towards the Middle East in various ways has made people very weary of the Americans and the potential that whatever administration is there won't last. And this, I think, is a major factor in Biden's trip right now to the Middle East because the Middle Easterners, some of them are hoping that Trump or somebody like Trump will be back in the White House. So I think it makes it much more difficult and ever more necessary to line up congressional support. That's where you get your bipartisan stuff. That's where in the Balkans in the 1990s with Senator Dole, with Senator Biden, these guys were 100% on the same wavelength with respect to Kosovo and Bastia. Any final comment on that point, Fred? Yeah, I mean, I agree entirely with Dan. I have had the pleasure of working for and with some people who were immensely skilled in doing meaningful, meaningful, frank conversations on Capitol Hill with members of both parties laying out very clearly what the challenges were and soliciting input. I agree. We have a bad situation now in terms of polarization, but we still have on Capitol Hill many people who are well-staped in the art of politics, and it's quite often. I know in my career I've been the recipient of pretty good advice from members of Congress. Bernie, I'll give you the last word on this question. I think that polarization in our domestic politics is doing much more damage in our foreign policy than people acknowledge. And you could see that in the four years of the previous administration where we didn't have ambassadors or system sectors appointed for a year or a year and a half. Some of that has scrolled over into this administration, but it wasn't just a fight over a particular policy where we had to worry about art of politics. It's the institutional support for the State Department for diplomacy. And I think the Republican Party in the previous era of a kind of isolationist populism that we know very well govern them for a lot of the post-war period. So I think that it's going to hurt us because we're not going to have credibility around the world if we can't even send an ambassador to many, many countries that are extremely important to us. And that has already happened. Thank you. I'm going to turn to Lee's Grandi and just say we've been unpacking peacemaking here this afternoon. And I think we should do more of it. But in the meantime, there are copies of Fred's book outside and it's a heck of a read and he is willing to sign a copy or two. I have a feeling. So please join me in thanking Fred Dan and Bernie for joining us this afternoon.