 I'm Richard Boucher. I'm the Towsley Foundation policymaker and residence here at the Ford School. Before I introduce our speakers, I want to acknowledge the hard work and excellent preparations of Professor Al Stam, director of the Ford School's International Policy Center, and Thea Rowe for her work in planning and event. Thank you very much. You all know me here. I'm trying to masquerade as a professor, but my first admission is that I'm one of these guys. I'm a career diplomat who's trying to turn into a teacher. They've done it successfully all ready, but let me introduce them. Melavitsky, many of you know, he's a Michigan grad who became a senior leader in the U.S. Foreign Service. He was executive secretary of the State Department running all of his little guys down below. He was U.S. ambassador in Bulgaria and Brazil. He was a head of what we affectionately called Drugs and Thugs, which is the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, which comes with its own small Air Force. Now he's in his second career translating all that experience into knowledge for you here at the Ford School as he's done previously in Syracuse. So Mel is with us here all the time and I'm proud to be among his colleagues again. John Negropani, our main guest today, is one of America's most accomplished diplomats. He served 37 years in the Foreign Service, including early days in Vietnam before some others of us in college were out demonstrating against the war. He was confirmed, I think, eight times by the Senate if I did the math right. And he represented the United States as ambassador in five different countries in Honduras, Mexico, Philippines, Iraq, and New York at the United Nations. He went on to become director of national intelligence and deputy secretary of state, making all of his career officials both envious and proud. And now he works in Washington for the McClarty Group and he teaches at a university in New Haven that has a four letter name. John's experience distinguishes him from the rest of us. He's demonstrated leadership over and over again in all these jobs in the service of our country, of presidents of both parties and secretary states, secretaries of state of both parties. Now all of us have served in some difficult and even controversial situation. I'm glad he's here to reflect on that experience. I've worked for both these guys. I look forward to hearing the conversation about leadership between these two most excellent American diplomats. And I'd like to remind all of you in the audience that if you have a question for Ambassador Negroponte or for Ambassador Lubitsky, please write it on one of the cards passed out at the entrance. School volunteers will begin collecting cards at around 5 p.m. and our students, Amanda Van Dorn and Dima Singh. We'll read your questions. If you're watching online, you could submit your question via Twitter and use the hashtag Ford Policy Union. That's all the one more. I suppose if you're watching the audience, you can tweet the question too. Anyway, John Mel, the floor is yours, please. Thank you. Now, let's see if we're wired up okay? Here is. Yeah, so I have my David Frost clipboard. Not Nixon. Okay. So today we're going to have a, okay, I do too, up to a certain point. Today we're going to talk about leadership and foreign policy. One of the things that's important at the Ford School and most schools of public policy is what constitutes good leadership. Certainly important in government but across the board in terms of non-governmental organizations, international organizations, business organizations. So we want to talk about this a little bit and we'll have a free-flowing conversation which we'll, as we talk, we'll get into some subjects that have current relevance as well. But you know, John and I have been colleagues for a long time and he's had such a long distinguished career, we can't pass up his comments on some of these challenging assignments that he had and give us some insight into the decision-making process, into the leadership that went into both that he exerted and how he observed presidents and secretaries of state. John has known presidents and secretaries of state dating from the Nixon administration. So we'll use that opportunity. So the first thing, John, I'd like to ask you is a general question. When you think of the concept of leadership, what qualities do you think of? What defines good leadership? What defines good leaders? And thank you, by the way. Thank you very much. Well, it's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me and I welcome this opportunity to be interviewed by you, Mel, and to have an exchange with the audience. What defines good leaders? Some leaders or potential leaders don't ever get that opportunity. In a way, leadership is sort of the baptism by fire, it seems to me. I mean, how would we have ever found out that Lincoln was a good leader if it hadn't been for the Civil War or Franklin Roosevelt had not been for the advent of the Depression or the Second World War? So it seems to me that history plays a role in all of this and I suppose to my way of thinking is I look at American history anyway and keep that universe of leadership to people from our country. It's people who are able to respond with calm, collectively, and with a sense of direction in the face of very adverse circumstances. It seems to me that that would be kind of my shorthand definition of leadership. So what about knowledge? What about ideology or strongly held ideas? What about flexibility, which is a different kind of quality as well? All right. Well, so now you think of presidents and secretary of state. And I think, in a way, you get into different categories of position and leadership. I mean, you asked me, is there a difference between most presidents aren't going to, no matter how much knowledge they have, are probably not going to have enough knowledge to be able to deal with a variety of circumstances that they're going to confront right from the beginning. Take the example of Mr. Obama. He'd been in the state legislature and then he'd barely completed a term as senator and then he finds himself in the United States. Well, how on earth can you have enough knowledge about 100 and so many countries in the world, the different alliances, the confrontations we face, and so forth. So if you wanted to rate presidents on the basis of knowledge of foreign affairs, for example, when they first came into office, I guess you'd have to put at the very top of the list George Herbert Walker Bush. I mean, in modern times because he'd been director of the CIA, he'd been our representative in Beijing, and he'd been ambassador to the United Nations. I mean, he was almost from a foreign policy point of view qualified to be president by competitive exam. But of course, that's not the way it happens. So he was extremely knowledgeable, but he also, he surrounded himself with very good people and he had a very congenial team. And I think it's probably the best foreign policy team that we've had in our government in recent memory. I think as you go down the ladder, I think you expect a higher level of expertise. By the time you get down to the level, say, of an ambassador, sure, you have a big embassy, let's say your named ambassador to China or to Russia, you have a big embassy to Iran and you obviously have to have a modicum of managerial capabilities. But to my way of thinking, if you're going to go to one of those critical posts, you really ought to have a deep knowledge of the society and the culture and hopefully the language of the country to which you're being chosen to represent the United States. So it varies a little bit from the position. I want to interject here a recent example of this, which I think is a really bad example of choosing personnel. The recent appointees to go to Argentina and Norway who testified and knew nothing about either country. They were, of course, political appointees, so they had that old thing about I can pick up the phone and call the president, which is kind of a myth, I think. Usually not really true. Pamela Harriman, as I remember, could do that. Very few could do that. So I think that's a good point. I want to ask you a very specific question and I don't mean to be partisan or favorable toward one or the other in any way, but President Carter, for example, had a very strong influence on foreign affairs. Human rights became a much more solid part of our foreign policy and he had Camp David. And President Reagan did a lot, but he had Iran Contra, and yet, and certainly couldn't have been depicted as someone very knowledgeable up for an affairs when he came into office. So why was it generally considered that Reagan was a good leader and Carter was not? What's the deal here? Yeah, what's the deal? Well, of course, one of the deals is that I guess we can agree when it comes to politicians at that level, the electorate passes judgment in and of itself. And of course, Mr. Carter was defeated in his bid to win a second term. I would agree with you that he, I think the Camp David Accords were a major accomplishment in American foreign policy. But on the other hand, at the very end of his administration, he was completely unable to cope with the question of Iran and the seizure of our embassy and the hostage taking of our diplomats in that country bungled a rescue attempt and kind of left us feeling rather helpless and hopeless at the end of his administration. And you could, those of us who were old enough to remember that time, we could see the tide shifting right in front of our eyes moving from Carter to Reagan. Reagan, first of all, I think he was lucky. He came out of the Iran contra thing in the end more or less unscathed. I think also the progression of his term of office was very interesting. And I did work closely with Reagan. I was his deputy national security advisor for more than a year, so I used to see him every day. But we went from the evil empire, you'll remember that at the beginning, that's how he characterized the Soviet Union, to then this watershed meeting that he had in December, I think it was, or late November of 1985, which he had with Mr. Gorbachev near Geneva. And then all of a sudden, Mr. Gorbachev became his friend. And he proceeded in his second term to establish a much friendlier relationship with the Soviet leadership that led to a major arms control treaty at the end of his administration. And I think that generally speaking, everybody feels that we were moving our foreign policy in a very positive direction. And of course, a couple of years later, the Soviet Union actually disintegrated and the Berlin Wall collapsed and so on and so forth. So Reagan I think benefits from the evolution of history. He also benefits, let's face it, I remember correctly after a very difficult economic period at the beginning with high unemployment and high inflation, he benefited from a significantly improved economic situation in, shall we say, the second two thirds of his government. So I think that was a factor as well. I thought he was very serene in the way he dealt with things and I think that's the way, well he was. We briefed him, he didn't get all panicked. He didn't always, you know, what are we going to do? I mean, he was always, we always started, I mean, I briefed him, I went in with General Powell. He was a national security and he always started with about five minutes of jokes and he'd pull him out of his drawer. He loved Polish jokes, he loved Russian jokes and he told him and he read them to us and I mean he really took them seriously and then we went on to his briefing but I never, I don't, I never knew him to flap really and yet he had very, he had much more intellectual curiosity than he was given credit for. He read Gorbachev's book on Perestroika before he met him. I once was sort of the moderator at a luncheon that he had with about 20 Soviet scholars, American Soviet scholars that we went around the table and he asked questions of each of them for a one and a half hour period. Not sure a lot of Americans gave him credit for that kind of engagement. Yeah and well, I think also since I was in Washington at the time as Executive Secretary, I think we have to give a lot of credit to Secretary Schulz too as a leader in terms of his influence and also Nancy Reagan. I think Nancy Reagan had a big, you tell me if you think this is right, had a big effect on Ronnie. She was thinking of his, they had a very close relationship. She was thinking of his historical legacy and this whole thing with leaving something besides just the evil empire talk I think was important to her and to him. Well first on Mrs. Reagan, General Powell when he briefed me on my job as Deputy National Security Advisor, he said I'll handle Mrs. Reagan. I mean this is Powell. So I said okay. So I never really had much to do with Mrs. Reagan except an occasional helicopter ride when I was accompanying the president somewhere and she was always perfectly gracious and kind. I think you're absolutely right about George Schulz. I think he was a wonderful Secretary of State. He was a superb leader of people and I think that came from a combination of his first of all Marine. He was a former Marine and I think that really meant a lot to him. He'd fought his way up the Pacific Island chain during World War II and he never forgot that part. He was an academic and a great scholar and this was in fact his third cabinet post. He'd been Secretary of Labor and Treasury under Richard Nixon. There's again knowledge and experience at a high level. If you, I want to say if you've run one cabinet department in the government you probably have a pretty good chance of being able to run just about any one of them and I think he had that kind of leadership experience and most importantly and I'm sure you'd remember this when something really bad happened like a terrorist incident, the hijacking of an airline or one of those TWA airlines, I got hijacked at least somewhere, George P. Schulz afterwards would say now this is you know a priority issue for me and we'll have a meeting on terrorism question every morning in my office at 7 o'clock or 7 15 for a you know a period of weeks until he felt he had the issue under proper management and control within the Department of State and I thought that was leadership. You know he also, before he made a lot of trips to Moscow, before he went to Moscow he always had what he called a Saturday seminar. He'd pull academics in that knew something about the Soviet Union, historians and others and he'd have this talk in the afternoon before he went there. So he was able to kind of bridge this this gap that some people think exists between academia and well that I think there's a good example of how his academic background served him very well and I did attend at least one if not more of his seminars because I remember going to one of his Saturday seminars on Mexico subject in which I had a great deal of interest when I was deputy national security advisor and then subsequently became ambassador there so I was able to witness that personally. So let me Richard mentioned controversy challenges I want to ask you about Honduras. It's a long time ago a lot of controversy over Honduras, Central America, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Contras, Sandinistas. Can you talk a little bit about how what interactions you had with the Secretary of State, with the President and how you ran an embassy that was very diverse where we had a considerable presence and as I recall a good deal of disagreement even within the Foreign Service Corps about what our policy was going. I remember there were Foreign Service Office that used the dissent channel in the State Department for example to register disagreement. So can you talk a little bit about that? That was a tough post I know. That was my first ambassador ship actually to a country. I'd had the rank of ambassador for some fisheries negotiations that I'd done before that but that was my first post if you will as an ambassador. I went down there in November of 1981 which was during the Reagan administration. I'd actually hoped to go to Southeast Asia because I had been the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Southeast Asia but that didn't work out. That's a long story. So I got called by Thomas Enders, the Assistant Secretary one day and asked me if I'd like to go to Honduras. I said sure I want to have an ambassador ship and actually Mr. Reagan was a very being the gracious man that he was. He used to call ambassador nominees personally to offer them. I think the only president that did that. Yeah I'd never got called by any other president about that. Maybe by President Bush because at that point I was at a much more senior level but I happened to be traveling at the time. You know I knew this was in the works and the White House operator calls my home in Washington and we'd been sort of on tenor hooks were we going to get this job or not and the White House operator called and said his ambassador is Mr. Negropani there and my wife said no he's in Manila. I was there on some kind of mission and they said oh well we'll wait till he comes back and my wife said no please please call him now. She wanted to get this waiting period over with. Anyway the president the White House operator tracked me down and I was at a meeting with the Filipino Secretary of Commerce and boy was he impressed. His secretary walked into the office Mr. Negropani President Reagan is calling you. That's the only time something like that had ever happened to me. He was successful in the negotiation. He must have thought I had a lot of clout and he invited me to do that job. Anyway a number of months later I went down. Honduras at the time I got there had just had elections or no they'd just written a new constitution and they were about to have elections for a president after a nine-year interval of military rule and about three weeks after I got there they had these presidential elections and I was there for the next three and a half years. It was a very turbulent period because basically the phrase I like to use was Honduras was surrounded by trouble. In Nicaragua the Santanistas had come to power about a year or two earlier. In El Salvador there was basically a civil war going on and in Guatemala they had the makings of a civil war as well. There was a lot of internal turmoil and in fact you had refugees from every one of these countries in Honduras. Honduras had a huge number of refugees from those other countries so they were in a very vulnerable position. As you mentioned there was the contra thing. I got there November 6 November 19th. The president approved one of these findings for covert action to arm some of the rebels inside of Nicaragua which I had not been advised of before I went down to Honduras. I learned about it after I got there and that what started out as a fairly small sort of effort ended up with about as you said a rather large embassy with a large number of CIA people and probably three or four thousand people under arms that maybe more at its peak. So there was that going on. There were refugees as I said and we also established a close relationship with the Honduran military and established an air base there. We negotiated an access agreement to an airfield there and we stationed some U.S. troops there some six or seven hundred because we had limitations on how many people we could send to El Salvador. There came a point at which the Congress took exception without going into all the details to the contra business and voted an amendment called the Boland Amendment to which prohibited military assistance to these people and quite unwisely I think thereafter people within the president's administration working around the embassy around me around everybody else chose to illicitly support the countries with funds from Saudi Arabia and heaven knows where else which got revealed at one point and caused a great deal this in 1987 I believe it was and put the administration through a period of real real tension and anxiety but the president somehow survived the controversy the whole contra program was completely shut down. So this is a question that often comes up in our classes I'm sure it comes up at Yale as well how do you deal with how do you deal with dissent in a situation like that there was seemed to be there was since this was coming in a kind of illegal operation with Alley North and some of his cohorts and but the policy was set support for the the country's opposition to the Sandinistas I'm sure you had some ideas about this and yet as ambassador you were bound to carry out exactly what had been decided by the president yeah well there's some and you have a and you get a letter that says you're in charge of this yeah from the president particularly complicated situation because and here's the part for anybody who's going to be an ambassador the hardest part is if Washington is divided about what to do it really makes your job that much harder if you know there's serious division between the State Department and the White House and there was you mentioned that if you know there's serious division between the Congress and the White House and you're supposedly representing the entirety of the United States of America and country X Y or Z it's very hard when you don't feel you have a unified government behind you and I think one of the ways I dealt with it is I had a fairly clear idea of some things that were not controversial that I knew I wanted to get done for example support a build-up in economic and military assistance to the government of Honduras for legitimate purposes nothing to do with this contra business or anything else but Honduras was vulnerable if the Nicaraguans who had an army four or five times as large as Honduras ever decided to lash out at them they were going to be very exposed so I worked on trying to build their military up in a sensible way but to build it up nonetheless and also to get the more economic assistance because they were very much under stress because of the refugees and all the turmoil in Central America that made Honduras not exactly the ideal investment destination so you had that problem luckily Dr. Kissinger came down with a commission at one point during our time there and they decided to recommend to the government that we we increase our aid to Central America and I think that was very including a lot of scholarships from Central American students and and they got that program going but how you deal with dissent I mean you I think the best way is to have a reasonably clear idea of what you yourself want to get done work on that and try to deal with the rest of the issues as best you can as you go along the general rule is a lot of talk a lot of debate up to the point of decision yes way after the point of decision you either stand to and care about the policy or but if someone in Washington is circumventing the law right unbeknownst to others or with a limited universe poses somewhat of a problem that makes it a little bit different yeah now anyway you mentioned kissing the best legacy of Honduras for me is I have five adopted Honduran children good for you and they've been a source of tremendous joy to me and my family all those years good you mentioned Kissinger yes I did you worked for Kissinger I did so talk about controversial I think in his older years now I mean he visited Brazil when I was there he seemed to have mellowed somewhat but he was a tough guy to work for can you and a leader can you talk about him a little bit he would I don't think he's going to be watching live in any case no that's okay he's a hard man to work for very hard he's a task master I know question about and I knew him all the way back in Vietnam when I was a political officer in Saigon and I was what they call a provincial reporter out of the political section the embassy and I covered the northern part of Saigon first core area for anybody who's a Vietnam vet here and Henry was a consultant for Henry Cabot Lodge he was a professor at Harvard and he came out to advise the ambassador and he came out two successive years I think 65 and 66 to advise or 64 and 65 advise him on how his political observations and trying to help us figure out what what to do in Vietnam and he was a lot of fun to take around and we each were assigned to take him around a certain part of the country so I knew him pretty well from his two trips to Vietnam where I had something to do with arranging his different visits and he was a highly intelligent articulate quick quick study a wonderful guy I then was in the Paris peace talks a few fast forward a few years later and under LBJ Avril Harman and Cyrus Vance were running the delegation and Henry again was showing up from time to time to be in touch with the delegation and of course Nixon wins the election and Henry becomes the national security advisor and about a year later I ended up working on the national being recruited to work on the national security council staff in a year or two in 1970 and after a few months in a sort of a obscure planning job I ended up being put in charge of the Vietnam account on the national security I was the director for Vietnam in the national security council so I accompanied him on every single one going forward from then of his secret negotiations with with the Vietnamese North Vietnamese to Paris and the different meetings we had we would take secret trips here there everywhere we would fly to in Air Force 1 to Orléans which was a French Air Force base and we take a small plane provided by President Pompidou and it would fly us to a little military airfield outside of Paris and then the defense attaché you remember General Walters need to meet us when his trench coat like that at the airport holly glottes well language is sort of you know Sam Spade kind of thing he gave us all aliases it was General Kirschbaum Winston Lord was Colonel Landry and I was Lieutenant Newman the only thing common is we got the first letter of our last name and we went and stayed with the Walters we were I don't know who we were fooling I mean the French Secret Service knew we were around and the Vietnamese knew we were coming to meet them so I'm not entirely certain whom we were trying to fool but he just loved that kind of thing well the China secret visit to China trip too but he was a real taskmaster I guess the most frequently heard story that people who worked for Kissinger will tell you is that if you walked into his office you gave him a paper that you'd worked on and he'd look at you and say is this the best you can do without even reading it and if you said no he'd give it back to you and say well come back when it's the best that you could do so people would dutifully go back and rewrite it and sometimes he'd make you rewrite papers I mean I've had to write rewrite a paper for him a dozen times he was a real perfect students keep that in mind and he worked any hour of the day yeah he would go out to a black tie dinner in washington go to a state dinner or the kennedy center or whatever it was and then he'd come back at 11 or 12 at night and and be working and if he was working on something that you had responsibility for he fully expected you to be there is it true that he said power is the greatest aphrodisiac I wouldn't put it past him okay i'm just curious because he was dating he dated jill st john i remember one of our one of my favorites one of our peace negotiations some of you will remember jill we come back the day that the vietnamese north vietnamese present us their plan to end the war and restore peace in vietnam a draft proposal in october october eighth of 1972 and henry promises them a counter proposal the next morning we all go back to the embassy we're staying at the embassy residence he asks us me winston peter rodman david engel to write the counter proposal and he goes out on a date with jill st john here we are the did he ask if that was a bit or did you ask him if that was the best we had to write it over again anyway because he didn't like it he thought it was too tough so i have another question uh this again in the reagan administration i was the deputy assistant secretary for human rights in the reagan administration which some people said is an oxymoron you that's not fair you were assisted that is not fair but then anyway that's an impression you were assistant secretary for oceans environment and science yes i was which also could have we know we were we didn't do the law of the sea treaty there was a a whole kind of resistance within the reagan administration to environmental things so you were you were i think in the job for a couple of years can you say that for two and a half years and i had done it two and a half years previously as the deputy at a bureau negotiating fishing agreements and i guess the one thing i would say is that that was the time 1987 when we negotiated uh for those of you who might be interested in international environmental issues the montreal protocol to protect the stratospheric ozone layer which was the one major global greenhouse gas uh emission agreement that has been achieved there hasn't been another one since and what i found interesting about that exercise and i was involved because my deputy was the negotiator richard benedict and he wrote a book about it actually called ozone diplomacy and what was really interesting about was the science advisor the president didn't believe the science they've been a mexican chemist i think chemical and Raymond and Molina Molina was the mexican and they'd successfully conducted an experiment that demonstrated that these chlorofluorocarbon molecules destroyed the ozone layer and the science advisor president didn't believe it the russians didn't believe it the japanese didn't believe it the europeans had questions uh we made an alliance this shows you how washington works uh mr schultz and mr whitehead we had a wonderful deaf whitehead state and a fellow who'd been the former head of golden sex we made a league with the head of the epa the environmental protection agency uh we mounted delegations scientific delegations from noa national oceanic and atmospheric administration nsa uh nasa the national aeronautic and space administration people who study these kinds of things and we sent them to russia we sent them to japan we sent them to brussels we convinced our scientific peers around the world the ones that you know would have weight in any such international negotiation of the merits of the science and we basically negotiated this agreement and then we got into one of these sort of things that only can happen in washington the gunfight at ok corral the showdown in the interagency meeting and mr schultz and mr whitehead held their ground along with the head of the epa and mr schultz wrote to the president said i'm sending a delegation to unless you object to montreal to sign this agreement uh next week unless you have objection and the president agreed so you know it's amazing how yeah who would have thought and don hodell and the interior secretary who was against it he said well you just you know it's not really a problem just use more sun cream that's what he's not kidding let's move on to mexico yes you had a interesting period there nafta was being negotiated i guess at the time not yet not yet but at least it was early stages right um you have three countries uh three leaders president uh prime minister of canada president of mexico um give us some observations about how you know this is still controversial interesting thing people still are talking about why are we letting those mexican trucks come all the way up here right so give us some insights into that it's quadrupled the trade between the two countries and been a fundamentally beneficial to the united states but how about then but then when uh i went down there was the summer of 89 and you have to go into 1990 because nothing much happened in that first year and our trade trade relationship with mexico was modest and our uh we didn't have any kind of free trader arrangement we've been discussing sector by sector uh liberalization of trade but you know when you think about it sector by sector liberalization means that you you pick the exceptions and liberalize them and then the rule is still to have the old protections in place but a seminal thing happened and i i think really it it it goes back to the end of the cold war the fact that the cold war uh was ending eastern europe was uh liberated wall went down and so carlo selenus the then president of mexico a phd political economist from harvard the ghost of michigan of the east the michigan of the east yes indeed and uh he goes to the world economic forum in davos switzerland in uh january of 1990 and he meets all these european eastern european leaders who are competing like crazy to get investment from the west to help modernize and revive their economies and mr selenus concluded my goodness competition for the savings of western countries is all of a sudden become a lot stiffer than it used to be and i've got to do something to make the mexican economy more attractive and so he's the one who proposed a free trade agreement with the united states and uh i went up uh his chief of staff sounded me out in march of that year i went up to washington i had an appointment to see president bush on whom i with whom i was on very friendly terms and i had a meeting with him and secretary baker and just one other person and we walked him talked him through the pros and cons of having a nafta in a one-hour meeting and he said yes go ahead and at first it was just going to be bilateral because mr baker had just been through the process of negotiating a free trade agreement with canada a couple years earlier and he hadn't enjoyed the there was some aspects of the negotiations that he hadn't found as enjoyable as he might have liked but uh when the canadians got you know wind of the fact that we were going to do a free trade agreement mr mulroney basically got on an airplane and went to kenny bugport main and persuaded mr bush that it had to be trilateral because he told him very bluntly he said look otherwise you're going to leave a you're going to be in the cockpit you're going to have a bilateral with us and a bilateral with mexico and you're going to be able to you'll be in the driver's seat we all ought to be in this together so we did a trilateral and started negotiations and by the end of 1992 we we completed the talks and signed the agreement in san antonio after mr bush had been defeated for reelection and then we all held our breath when mr clinton came to office and wondered what was going to happen and he appointed mickey canter to be the head the free trade the trade rep and he came down and met the mexicans and said we're going to have to do two additional agreements on environmental and labor conditions before we we go through with this and and i groaned and everybody else who'd worked for three years on this deal groaned but we actually believe it or not got that in august of 93 and uh you may recall this a bush uh clinton and gore ended up fighting harder for the nafta than i think uh george bush might have done i mean you remember the gore um ross perotabate which was all about the nafta and which was a great sucking sound which was an incredible argument on tv and then mr clinton really went to bat for the nafta uh in congress and it it it went through so it had strong bilateral by you know bipartisan support and it was quite an experience we you've had such a long career we have to excise some of the stops along the way one thing about mexico because it was controversial mexico that you've always got the good the bad and the ugly and uh in in that movie but yeah right i mean it's a little bit like that because for example the drug trafficking issues the violence right i had an issue that just sort of uh kind of haunted the relationship uh the entire time i was there and that was you may remember dr alvarez machine oh yeah he was the medical doctor mexican doctor who kept kiki kamarin agent dea agent kamarena alive with a some of you may remember the mexicans captured a dea agent drug traffickers did torture and tortured him to get information about what he knew about uh their what they were doing their trade and their practices and they used dr alvarez machine to torture to help keep him alive while they were torturing him so they could get more information and so a couple of years a few years later that was in 85 and when when i got there some bounty hunters came down from the states and snatched mr alvarez on their own initiative well uh snatched him from his medical office in guadalajara and lo and behold a few months later he was before a court uh in los angeles and uh there was a huge supreme court case on whether or not someone who had been detained or captured under such circumstances could rightfully be brought before an american court and believe it or not the supreme court upheld the government said it was okay uh and they drew on some precedents that went back to the 19th century when we'd had a lot of the bounty hunting activity there was a bolivian of peru cases that well there were canadian cases there were a lot of canadian cases in those days you better beware i mean you're near there you're not too far away so that was when the mexicans went into an uproar i mean i had demonstrations in front of my embassies for the next several days because of that decision but the worst of it was they then went to try him and he was dismissed for lack of sufficient evidence and i said my god you know how can we make such a thing out of this and then not have enough evidence to even snatch him i thought that was one of the worst showings of america of our uh you know our prosecutorial system it did uphold the doctrine it upheld the doctrine but didn't win the case now that's really i didn't win the specific case against him but that was a real albatross and we had to deal with it all the time yeah i'd like to jump ahead to the to the un we want to open this up yeah we're going to pretty soon but i want i want you to talk a bit about the u n 44 years and i know but anyway u n so you leave the foreign service yeah went to McGraw hill right uh as vice president executive vice president as i recall for international affairs and then you come back as i guess a political pointy is it correct to and are nominated or sent to the un as ambassador confirmed by the senate so i remember senator moinehan some of you will remember senator moinehan very he wrote a book in which he called the un a dangerous place mainly because of this zionism is racism resolution but can you talk about your experience yeah you were there when actually uh we tried to get this resolution through on iraq the second resolution second resolution to authorize the united states use military well let me say go ahead first of all it's a fascinating place i don't think it's dangerous uh moinehan did a great job okay he got rid of maybe he's successfully we successfully defeated the zionism as racism uh resolution but i don't know whether we did it during no we did actually did during clinton okay moinehan was very good though because he would drink everybody under the table in the afternoon and negotiate with them at the same time but for the russian with respect for the like senator he basically used great as a platform for his candidacy to become a senator right well how about i leave he's only there six months i mean i don't think that that's a particularly long tenure but in any case it's a fascinating place it gets a bum rap in the united states basically i mean i think the united nations can be very useful uh tool in our toolkit uh security council resolutions are binding on the entire membership of the the united nations and actually i got there six seven days after 9 11 and within two weeks where the first resolution we negotiated after i got there was a resolution uh that turned out to be extremely useful it was a template for how to deal with terrorism financing it was basically a draft law that every it was like an appendix to a security council resolution that every member country could use as a template for its own terrorist financing there was a lot of good stuff we did even on iraq i would say most of what we did was quite constructive including getting the first the the inspections of iraq renewed 1441 we put a huge amount of effort into that the difficulty in iraq with respect to iraq was that the administration had really and it's much clearer it became much clearer to me in retrospect than it was at the time had really decided to invade iraq anyway and uh so this the un was kind of a distraction i think the president was willing to give it a chance uh but only if it produced results very tony blair put some pressure yeah i mean well tony blair i mean the british didn't do us a favor they they told the president you have to have a second resolution we got this first resolution that sets up the inspection system but says iraq is in material breach i mean the the onus is on them to prove that they're not in material breach of its international obligations and so we were ready to go without a second resolution just based on the fact that they weren't cooperating with the inspectors but blair said his attorney general insisted that there be a second resolution otherwise you wouldn't be able to accompany us and the irony of it is that by seeking a second resolution we lost the french the french had been telling us exactly the opposite they were saying don't whatever you do don't try to get a second resolution if you do something with just the first one they were animating that they might be able to live with that so we followed blair's advice and the french then threatened to veto so the whole thing was over and then the british accompanied us anyway even though we didn't have a second resolution so it was a little bit of a mess so tell me how you know yeah you win a few you tell me so i think you've said that you thought it was not a good decision to invade iraq i thought it was too soon i felt that we went through it how do you handle that at the un when you're pushing for pushing for this we we put a huge amount of effort into getting the first resolution setting up the inspection 1441 was a i mean an enormous effort and we got a unanimous resolution even the syrians came along with us at the last minute i remember they called me as i was walking down to the security council to cast my vote uh and that was in like late november and to be making war preparations then in january february i thought was a little bit premature any anybody who's going to set up an international inspection system and elaborate un process knows it's going to take a number of months to begin it they'd be able to see whether you're going to get results or not i would have thought i think they were worried about the that the hot season was coming it was going to get very hot in iraq in the summer and the troops were already moving out there as i said they were really ready to go yeah so then they told us to get the sec try to get the second resolution we couldn't get it even with that you remember the famous appearance by general powell with me and infamous that would infamous and george tenet sitting behind him and he was trying to persuade everybody in good faith i should add at the time that that iraq had wmd um and uh then the president invaded he ordered the invasion in the middle of march march 18th so how do you deal with that in what way i mean i i'm the ambassador of the united nations i'm not uh i wasn't even a cabinet member there were some un ambassadors or cabinet remember so i didn't even attend the meetings in the situation room with it dealt with these kinds of decisions this was the old the slam dunk thing correct tenet said it's a slam dunk that they have wmd well he was wrong he was wrong he was wrong and they over relied on one source who turned out to be basically an iraqi who wanted us to invade iraq and curveball therefore fed us false information and it's in fact the occurrence that led eventually to the creation of uh one of my future jobs as director of national intelligence so then you go to iraq as i go i volunteer to go right after jerry brim or after that when the occupation is going to be ended i volunteered to go because i said i'm a senior diplomat i've been in this business for uh well more than 40 years really when you added it all up and uh i'd had some experience of yet nam that had taught me i thought some good lessons about how civilian and military efforts should collaborate together i felt i could whether you agree with the decision or not you can make the implementation you know such thing as good implementation and bad implementation and i thought i could contribute to the better implementation of our policy in iraq by volunteering to go out there okay the president invited me down for an interview 20 minutes you think we'll be the job i want you to just say a few words about um so you were a cabinet member eventually because you became the director of national intelligence first one cabinet rank which was a recommendation by the 9-11 commission and by the variety wmd committee and so you had to start from scratch in putting this together it's now i would say a relatively viable enterprise general clapper has been there for how long three years three and a half you weren't there that long and then you were long enough deputy secretary of state yeah i didn't spend enough time there how about how about a uh a minutes worth of two minutes worth of description can you do that in two minutes of the dmi yeah yeah i mean it was basically it was the i know you can do this side the beltway part of the intelligence function i mean it was plans budget policy analysis it was not an operational job running operations or entities outside the country or anything else it was a sort of an oversight function but but accompanied by the title and a very important function in my view of being the principal intelligence advisor to the of the president and as a result of bylaw as a result of which i was at all his intelligence briefings and he was very interested in intelligence and he got them six days a week every monday through saturday at eight o'clock in the morning and those always turned out to be extremely interesting sessions with the president of the united states do you know if this is continued under president obama it has to my understanding maybe sometimes a little not quite the same clockwork regularity but yes but it's institution does yes it does okay and and mr clapper has access to we could spend hours on this well the one point i'd make about intelligence is intelligence needs to intelligence is a tool not a panacea and intelligence is not just collection a lot of people think of intelligence says james bond and daring do efforts to collect information by breaking into people's offices intelligence is the collection and analysis of information for the purposes of statecraft and as far as i was concerned it's the analytic function where we frequently go wrong where we don't see the trend we don't see the truth that's staring us in the face it's not whether we fails to collect this or that okay so as i say we could go on for a long time we have questions whoops let's see yep okay how so you're going to pose the questions you've picked some of these out we're going to read some of the questions okay given all right my name is amanda i'm a first year's master's student here so on behalf of the students who just want to thank you for taking some time to answer some of the questions from the audience the first question is given your experience in the government what do you think the u.s response should be to the situation you claim given the u.s leadership vacuum in the wake of mcfall's resignation his resignation coincides with pro russian protest in the Crimea military activity in Russia and Russia's acceptance of Yanukovych's request for asylum do you think mcfall's resignation empowers russia to interfere in Ukraine who's right resignation of the Yanukovych Yanukovych yes mcfall's regis mcfall's resignation oh mcfall's resignation yeah i'm not sure i know what uh relationship that has to do with Ukraine but the basic question is what should we do about Ukraine is it not yeah yeah um mcfall's leaving anyway yeah here's uh what i think uh i think it was in the spring of 2008 that there was the Bucharest NATO summit that uh mentioned the possibility of georgia and the Ukraine right becoming members of NATO and i think that we pushed the envelope just a bit too far in terms of expanding our radius of western influence into what the russians refer to as their near abroad it was one thing to do it in the 1990s when russia was weaker and we sort of got a some of these things got accomplished luckily for them i think and for us like the baltic states and the central european countries but i think that given the fact that russia was back on the ascendancy their economy had quadrupled quintupled in size from its nadir Putin's feeling is oats they've it's not only the increasing price of oil it's the doubling of production of oil and so forth and i think that that russian invasion of georgia in the summer in august of 2008 was really the signal that you're going this far and no further that's the way i interpreted what the russians did and so i think they're for them the question of the fate of Ukraine is a very neurologic issue particularly since their historic ties and everything else and frankly i don't know where this seesaw is going to end because when i saw Yanukovych uh flea and new government take over in kiv and now the russians conducting exercise in uh near the border of eastern Ukraine i think it's kind of a very potentially explosive mix there and i think we need to be i think we need to deal with this in a low key way i don't think we should crow about the success of a pro-western government getting into office in kiv and i think we should encourage some sort of reconciliation between these diverse elements in in the ukraine in whatever best way we can but without being too interventionist maybe letting the europeans take something of the lead then you've got the other question about well who's going to pony up the money for this financially distressed economy and that's another question we're going to have to deal with as well my name is seema singh i'm a master's student at the ford school and i'm asking more audience questions um in retrospect was it a good idea to arm Shiite militias in iraq in service of the so-called solid option can iraq be considered a success when there continues to be persecution of religious minorities and a lower standard of living than under Saddam Hussein's rule well i've never been much of a fan of arming militias i think it's contrary to the concept of trying to build national institutions and certainly while i was there my desire was to build the army uh and the police forces but in the hope that they would become truly national institutions i'm not aware that we ever armed shia militias i think there was a shia militia under the rule of under the command of muktada al-sader but he in fact we fought against him for a while there was a when i got there there was a rebellion in najaf and there was a rebellion in sodder city and on the edge of baghdad uh which was ultimately brought under some kind of control what the groups that we did arm were the sunni militias out in the western part of the country in el anbar to help fight al qaeda and that met with the modicum of success but still it's not a good long term i mean i don't think militias are ever a good long term solution would i consider iraq a success um well i we said earlier i i'm not sure i would have gone in you know when we did so i think they're and i'm not sure we went in in the right way when we finally did go in i think it's hard to to judge where it's going to turn out we might i think there's a somewhat of a chance we might be pleasantly uh surprised but at the moment they're going through a difficult patched will they fall back into complete disarray i don't think so i think that the the institutions of the state are are really quite large and substantial and i think my my guess and it's only a guess would be that they'll hold together but they're surrounded now by an awful lot of turmoil i mean syria egypt so on and so forth the next question is do you think the military has taken over us foreign policy if so is this due solely to budget size and how can it be reversed what was the last part of the question due to budget size so is it solely due to budget size and how can it be reversed yeah well you know if you go to war someplace and you're in uh afghanistan or iraq and you have a military command with 50 or 100 thousand troops there there's no way that they're not going to have influence on the policy towards that country i mean it's it's a wartime situation but uh i think in most places i think our military is quite respectful of uh civilian political leadership and uh it's basically a shared responsibility but in most places you go around the world you visit a country where there's an embassy it'll be the ambassador who has responsibility for all the elements as ambassador levitsky was saying of the country team who's really the principal spokesperson and the principal local representative of our policies i think uh during this period of the decade of 2002 to 2000 well to the president there's probably been a disproportionate military role but that's sort of receding back into a little better perspective it seems to me and the other elements of national power are coming more to the fork this is something one thing the sequester seemed to have pushed forward you know you know um the other secretary gates actually was quite uh open about saying there should be more of financing for the state department and for the defense department to get out of so-called nation building it was something for state to do and in fact he established a fund when secretary clinton was there to kind of put together a sort of stabilization reconstruction unit that could provide mostly civilian aid to so this goes to a more fundamental issue my now i've got you know i guess i could make some generalizations after having first entered the foreign service in 1960 i don't think we're too good at nation building i mean i don't think we do that part very well and i don't think we're very good at regime change um and i don't think our experience has been particularly salutary the the overthrow of zm in vietnam what did that lead us to the overthrow of samosa of the shah you may not like the way they led their countries but almost invariably if the situation got worse after these things were done the overthrow of saddam so um sometimes you have to be a little careful what you wish for seems to me and and and you also have to maybe have a little bit of strategic patience so democracy isn't going to be built overnight we have a lot of important alliances around the world i think those are the the institutions that we should really support our alliances with nato with japan with korea with australia new philippines tylan and those are relationships we should nurture in the first instance and then hope perhaps by our example that these concepts take hold in other parts of the world and if you look i mean the news is actually quite encouraging in some parts of the world if you look at africa the degree of uh democratic governance uh today compared to 50 years ago or when they first got their independence a lot of these colonial countries or latin america when i first joined the foreign service practically every country was a dictatorship and today the the dictatorships are the exception to the rule and if you look at what happened in eastern europe at the end of the cold war it's not because of us that they became democratic it's because of themselves so i think sometimes we shouldn't be too hasty to substitute our own desire to be active for allowing maybe the roots of good governance to take hold in in the countries themselves so i wish we'd adopt a bit more of a while being interested in the world and caring about maintaining major institutions such as the breton wood system a free trade system trades very important but maybe a little bit more laid back when it comes to telling other people how to run their political business it's the finger-pointing part of our diplomacy that that gives me pause this is the hardest thing for us to do i think it's very lay back it's just not in our constant not the our constitution our inward constitution we tend to be activists well i'll abbaser boucher is going to be here a couple of more months he can explain to you how he was told to finger point so often when he got up on the press dais in in the state department about commenting on every which thing that was happening in different countries expected over torture centers interact during your over what um torture centers during your ambassadorship is torture okay what no under certain circumstances what makes torture of accused terrorist different compared to the toward captor and torture of our own troops and agents no and uh i think that's a very good point and that's probably the best darned reason uh why uh well first of all torture doesn't work and secondly uh if you want your troops to be treated properly under the jadeva convention you better treat other people likewise there was a we had a seminal sort of point in the vietnam war where at first we didn't want to treat the vietnam con uh as uh combatants uh because uh because we didn't want to be bound by the laws of war in the way we dealt with vietnam but our pentagon jumped into that argument very rapidly to say look i mean what we gotta think about our people we had two thousand in the end of the war we had two thousand two hundred people who were prisoners so wait a minute the first part of this question said there were torture centers in iraq no that's right no before i got there and it got shut down and it was a great humiliation and embarrassment for the united states and it was totally repudiated by our government it was not authorized behavior it was outrageous i'm not saying it wasn't outrageous but it certainly wasn't sanctioned behavior anyway it doesn't work and you don't want it done to our people and that's not a bad place to start and yeah so there are a number of questions about um central america so we're just going to read one um what lessons can we learn for us foreign policy today from the era in which you served in central america which has largely been characterized by the violent and covert overthrow democratically elected governments are these practices still necessary for us foreign policy today well i guess if you tried to date the last and somebody's going to correct me but uh the last overthrow of a central american government it was the overthrow of the guatemalan government in 1954 armenes when i was a high school student it's not been a feature of of our government since they become progressively more democratic uh look central america was a very interesting combination of circumstances uh poverty uh large differences between rich and poor uh social injustice overlaid by cold war competition where you which aggravated the situation and which was exploited by the uh protagonists if you will i find it very interesting that really these conflicts ended up being much more amenable to solution as the cold war came to an end garbachev made a decision in the mid 1980s to no longer support wars of national liberation and by uh 1990 uh a democratic candidate was able to defeat the sandinistas at a pole in a in a free election there's something we didn't believe was going to be possible so i think once you take the cold war dimension out of it the central american issues became more manageable but the salvador war ended also when i was ambassador to mexico we signed the the peace accords of chapultepec in mexico but and it was a very moving moment to watch the salvador and rebels and the salvador and president walking out into the middle of the room embracing each other having not ever even met before to end uh this war now what's disappointing about what's happened since is that uh in a lot of these countries now the the violence of the civil wars and tensions of the past has now been substituted by these gangs these criminal gangs in central america and honduras has got gangs that are a number two or three times the size of the army and that's a huge uh social problem and it's a big problem in el salvador and guatemont has also been a problem for us because many it leads to crime many of the many of the gangs are from deported from los angeles from los angeles yes indeed yeah it's uh but so that's it continues to be a tragic situation it's and it's an area where i think mexico and the united states could cooperate with each other mexico borders right on these countries they have a they have a national security stake in the situation in central america if only because these people migrate through and violate their border constantly to come up and immigrate into the united states and because you know it just figures any country has an interest in having a stable and prosperous neighbor so to the extent that we together can work with the central american countries to help improve their livelihood and their economic situation that would be to the good and the last point i'd make in that regard is that mr bush i think uh george w had a good idea negotiating this central american free trade agreement with the united states but we've never quite been able to take advantage of it as much as we ought to there ought to be more american investment going down there to take advantage of the free trade terms that we negotiated with them i don't know why it hasn't happened maybe the last question i mean it's great do you have another one you run out of question no i don't think now we'll think of something i'll take a second the question states i believe most americans today would say us intervention in vietnam iraq and afghanistan as finally conducted we're not within the worth we're not worth the price and lives and money how can leaders make it more likely the united states will say no when strong intervention will cause more harm than good and what can citizens do to get such you know well i can't i can't argue with your basic proposition because anytime you send us forces somewhere and you don't have a desired outcome people rightfully say well why did we do it in the first place how do we avoid doing it in the future well first of all let's remember that the cold war is over that's one point so i think that reduces the likelihood i think we have to be smarter in how we cope with some of these issues in terms of responding to terrorism i don't think it's automatically followed that because the attack against the world trade center was staged or planned in afghanistan that end up with a hundred thousand troops there i'm not sure that necessarily follows so you know we have to think these things through more carefully i think the political tolerance in this country for this kind of deployment or expedition is probably much lower than it's ever been there's a wonderful line i teach uh i co-teach a course on strategy at Yale with several diplomatic historians among them uh john louis gattis who's a great cold war historian and we we start out by reading all the classics and sun zhe the chinese strategist who only wrote a hundred pages or something starts out you know war is a very serious this is a sort of a paraphrase but war is a very serious matter a matter of life and death it must be considered very seriously and you know if you just remember that opening line of sun zhe uh you might avoid some mistakes but we'll see we'll see what happens in the future it's still a dangerous world out there we still have to work with other countries to try to help help maintain peace and security around the world i think one other answer would be use the united nations more some of these peacekeeping operations in the un un have turned out to be actually quite successful sierra leone was pacified by un peacekeepers Liberia peace was restored there sometimes we give as i said earlier the un a bum rap and we could probably use them better it's a better effect more efficiently and so we could spread that risk a little bit so we don't immediately get embroiled in political controversy over whether we should have undertaken some kind of a unilateral action and i guess that would be my last point james a baker was successful as a diplomat because he got a consensus resolution through the united nation security council for us to go into the first persian gulf war we had unanimity the russians the chinese the arab countries everybody and that makes a big difference we went into iraq without the legitimating imprimatur of a security council resolution so it seems to me if you're going to contemplate these kinds of activities go in there accompanied by others and ideally by the international community as a whole well thank you so much for coming thanks the audience wonderful your victims oh my victims yeah your victims i don't know