 In the second part of this interview, we're going to talk a bit more about the Middle East and US foreign policy towards Islamic State in particular. So Brett, you spoke before about coalition building, the importance of it in addressing these complex regional issues. And I think as you rightly pointed out previously that one of the success stories of coalition building was US coalition building against Islamic State, particularly as it related to operations in Syria, can you give us a bit of a sense in the challenges that you faced in putting together that coalition and why you think you're able to do it so successfully with that issue where it's been difficult to deal with with respect to other issues in other parts of the world? Well thanks, Roger. We first, when ISIS, I mean as most practitioners working on this stuff, we could see this bubbling in 2012-13, I testified with Congress about it in 2013 about Baghdadi and ISIS and what's coming. And I don't have to go through that whole story, but by the time it kind of bursts onto the international scene with Mosul and just that real catastrophe, and you effectively have a terrorist state, I mean ISIS was controlling territory the size of Britain, 8 million people under its domain, a billion dollars a year of revenue, and thousands of people pouring into Syria to fight and joining ISIS, it ultimately got up to almost between 40 and 50,000. Mind boggling in terms of its dimensions, and how do you get after something like that? So what we tried to do were just a few kind of first principles. We're not going to do this ourselves. We're not going to go in with the US combat forces kind of old style Iraq war, a very conscious and mindful of the debate here in the States about endless wars and over investment over commitment. So we probably could have done this faster in many ways by doing it ourselves. But we're not going to do that. OK, we're going to find local forces who are willing to do the fighting that's harder. That's a little messier. It makes a little more complex, ultimately more sustainable, both here and there, particularly in Iraq and Syria. Secondly, in terms of not doing it ourselves, we're going to join with allies and partners and build the largest coalition that we can. And so this started with about 12 countries in Saudi Arabia in late August of 2014. And by December of that year, we had almost 65 countries and partners together, including, I think, over 30 military contributors, even those first initial months. And how did we do that? It was a lot of gutting it out, capital to capital, myself and John Allen at the time, traveling all around the world. We were in Cumbra, I think, in early 2015, talking to military people, but also political leaders, because the one thing about coalition and alliances when you're building particularly military lines, these are political decisions in every capital and every capital has their different requirements, different legal standards, different political hurdles. And so we really tried to work through from capital to capital what they needed in order to contribute. And so it was a very conscious US decision from Obama on down that this is how we're going to do it. That made it harder and more complicated and a little slower at first, but eventually we built up some momentum. Now, one thing we had going for us was a shared interest in defeating ISIS and not just in Iraq and Syria, the global network. So we developed, I think, pretty unprecedented intelligence sharing relationships, law enforcement cooperation to try to really shut down these global networks that were feeding, feeding into what was then the ISIS caliphate. So it was a lot of American diplomacy, but harnessed by diplomacy from partners and allies, including Australia, just kind of it begins to really feed on each other in a very virtuous cycle. But that said, extremely difficult. I mean, I just, you know, and and you always come up anything in the Middle East when you can't just deal with ISIS, you have to deal with these other 20 problems. And, you know, I got it. And at the end of the day, we want the Middle East to be peaceful and everybody get along, understand that, too. And we have problems with Syria, Iran, everything. These it's just it's so multifaceted. But what ISIS allowed us to do was build a coalition and have a campaign plan that we envision would be very long term. So I use the word sustainable purposely because it was designed to be sustained for years. And that's because we knew by building a coalition against ISIS. We have legitimacy. There's international legitimacy, what we're doing. There's legality. There's no question under our domestic laws, we have legal authorization. And most coalition capitals, of course, the same thing. And we could harness this large coalition on this problem so that at the end of the day, once ISIS was defeated, we are left defeated territorially, not defeated for good. We are left with a pretty good platform in terms of a lot of partners and allies sharing a common interest. We have presence in Iraq and Syria, which we really didn't have before. And from that, you can harness cooperation to deal with a lot of other problems. So that was the idea of the conception. And every now and then when you do this kind of work, the conception kind of actually plays out. We were fortunate, but we were fortunate to have, again, because this was in the late stage of the Obama administration, a very good national security team, a very engaged president. So when things would happen, we were able to shift very quickly. So the battle of Kobani, there's an opportunity. What do we do? Difficult question. Obama made a decision and we dropped supplies to the Kurds in Kobani. We negotiated with the Turks to open up a corridor for the Iraqi Peshmerga to come in. You know, that was done. That took a lot of very high level work. When Ramadi fell in Anbar province, for example, we immediately shifted our entire focus to Anbar to set up a new platform near Ramadi, more special forces, and kind of got Ramadi back and then that kind of built. So we were able to kind of adapt as we were going forward because we had a very mature national security team and a strong coalition with constant engagement and communication between capitals. This is really hard to do. And in the current administration, it's not done very well. Yeah. Can I just ask when when you said you were when you put the coalition together, you were looking at a very long term and deliberate campaign plan against Islamic State. Did you have a sense of a time frame at that point when you put the coalition together, when you thought you could inflict decisive defeat on Islamic State? Or are you doing it by events focused rather than time focus? Yeah, actually, we got a lot of criticism in the beginning because it was three years to degrade to degrade ISIS's military capacity. Remember, Obama said degrade and ultimately destroy. And we got a lot of criticism that no, no, it's just go in and destroy. I got that's what I wanted. It's good to talk like that. But in fact, we want to be very clear this is going to take time, right? Because we're not putting in American Combat Forces and American Combat Divisions to go do the fighting. It's different. It's going to take longer. So we very consciously said three years in terms of the main phase of the campaign plan. But even then, we always we always said this will continue because it's not the type of thing with a battlefield Missouri moment in which everything's just over. So, you know, if you if you go back to kind of how we were talking about it in those early months and years, it was a longer term time horizon, but a lower commitment of American resources. So and that that's the kind of formula for something that is sustainable. That's kind of how we how we designed it. And I still think that was by and large, I was right. Yeah, I mean, it was very deliberate language and coming from military operational planning background myself. Once I saw the term degrade, then you I thought there's a big military campaign input into that. And this is a long term campaign plan, because as you rightly pointed out, you know, degrade frustrates the enemy, but it reduces the amount of resources that you have to commit to it. That having been said, it seemed to the anti Islamic State campaign plans seem to accelerate under the Trump administration was that part of the direction that came from the White House that they that they wanted it over quickly, or they believed that the degrade mission had been successful enough that you could accelerate. Yeah, great question. So one one reason we used to grade also is because we had no ground force in Syria, not only we had no ground force in Syria, we had no allies in Syria. I mean allies in terms of other countries of the coalition. Nobody was really ready, except some of the Arab states in the first night of air strikes and helping the air campaign. I think Australia did not join on the Syria side until the fall of 2015. Europeans, not until really 2016. So there was really no political desire to get involved in Syria. That was one of my frustrations is different not doing this because we had to, you know, ISIS didn't recognize that border and neither should we. But it took a while for for us to build up the diplomatic capital and capitals to have a coalition response in Syria. And then, of course, we invested an awful lot in the Syrian opposition working through Turkey to try to develop a ground force that would fight ISIS for Northwest Syria moving east. And this went on really for well over a year and it just didn't work. But we were introduced to the Syrian Kurdish forces and the YPG, which became the SDF through the Battle of Kobani and some other things. And eventually, you know, they started to make some gains. We started working more closely with them. The Arab, Syrian Arabs started filling those ranks just very quickly and rapidly, kind of snowballed. And so we invested in the SDF that caused friction with Turkey. I mean, that's the whole story as well, well understood. But so over the time Trump comes in, we had a ground force in Syria. You know, we're about we're about 20 kilometers north of Raqqa. And I was in a meeting with President Obama just before the transition in fact, in which we had a number of decisions that were teed up, that needed presidential decision making for legal reasons and other reasons before we could accelerate the campaign. And we passed a lot of those off consciously to the incoming administration because we wanted them to have a fresh look, right? And so we did we did take a fresh look. We did a strategic review. We kind of again tried to find a formula with Turkey. I want to came to Raqqa and some other things. And that all went up to President Trump and he made the decisions to accelerate, pretty much accelerate the existing campaign. And he was able to do that because he inherited a campaign plan that was working. So we're about 20 kilometers north of Raqqa. That's pretty much ready to go. So long as some decisions are made halfway through Mosul, the coalition was was working and operating and kind of coordinating in real time. And one of the first big meetings that the Trump administration had international meetings was we invited the coalition to Washington and Secretary of State Tillerson at the time kind of convened everybody with Jim Mattis. And I was there obviously to show that we are full steam ahead. In fact, we're going to start moving faster because we made some decisions. And that's what we did. So the first year of the Trump administration pretty much executing the existing plan with some tweaks, which made it move faster. And again, I think that the transition from Obama to Trump bumpy still being talked about a lot. But look, on this issue, I thought it very professionally handled. President Obama made clear to us immediately after the election. I think I saw him there too after the election. We have to make sure this handoff is smooth in the middle of a war. And that's pretty much what we did. Listen, this is probably the most difficult question which I'll leave to what is now the last question as well. What is, do you think there is a defined strategic end state regarding US policy in northeastern Syria? What are the conditions? What do you think the conditions should be set in place that allows US to extricate itself or its ground forces from Syria? I always shudder a little bit at end state questions in the Middle East because some of my very close colleagues in the Middle East reminded me my history in the Middle East goes back a pretty long time. And so thinking through, or kind of defining end states can get yourself in some trouble. So some issues are you need to manage, some issues need to solve. In northeast Syria, I think we actually had a pretty good situation by fall of 2018 or so. We had about a third of the country, a very small number of US forces. We built up a force of 16,000 Syrians. It was working pretty much, the border with Turkey was stable. We're doing a lot to ensure there'd be no threats across the border with Turkey. I mean, it was actually, it was a decent situation given where we had been in Syria. And it gave us an awful lot of leverage. I used to sit across the table from the Russians. I know for a fact that having a third of Syria, I never used the word control. We didn't control it, but we had influence there. That was our area of influence, but it gives you a lot of leverage, which you can then think of how to use smartly in a diplomatic effort. And at the time, Syria had the most complex international challenge, I think many of us have ever seen, but it was getting to the point where there was a moment for real great power diplomacy. Third of the country under the influence of the US, the Northwest under the influence of Turkey, and the rest of the country, Russia, Assad regime, and of course Iran. So the pieces were really set up for a real discussion about the future, in which the hope was we'd have a much better Syria. Just given the horrible things the Assad regime is responsible for, etc. So that has just significantly unraveled because of President Trump's impetuous decision to leave, which he's done twice. The second time we actually did just rapidly pull out of our bases, those, that backing was filled by the Russians and the regime. And we're now kind of in the far east corner of the country with some oil fields, and the president still talks about this mission as if it's only to protect oil fields. So all that said, what's the end state there? Look, I think we owe it to those who we worked with in the SDF to try to help them get the best possible deal they can to sustain themselves in the future Syria. They are Syrians. They are going to be there long after we're there. And whether that means they have a seat at the table in the Geneva political process, which I always believe they should. But if they don't, or if they can't, and if there is no real Geneva process, then there has to be some political arrangement for them, whether that's negotiated directly with Damascus, whether it's negotiated with the opposition. There's a lot of different pieces. And I know one of my former colleagues who's one of our best diplomats, Jim Jeffery, is running this file now. They're working a lot to kind of bring different Kurdish groups together, which I think is a good initiative. And obviously trying to tame down the tension with Turkey. Right now it's in us. Just it's a problem to manage. But I think you have to have an eye on what do we want here? We also have some real interests. National security interests. There's the camps at Al-Hal, which has about 10,000 or so detainees, about 2,000 foreign fighters. These are pretty hardcore ISIS folks that we do not want to see get out. I used to remind people about this problem. So I hear he came out of an Egyptian prison. Zarkawi came out of the Jordanian prison. Baghdadi came out of an American prison. You know, these prisons are an ecosystem for future Baghdadi's and Zarkawis. So that is a problem. I think we as allies, coalition partners really have to invest in the resource and make sure that that is handled as well as possible. But I just I'm not going to give you an end state answer because it's just too dynamic. But it will require a lot of diplomacy and a lot of forethought, which is difficult in this environment, to say the least. Brett, thank you very much. And your diplomatic experience shines through there with not trying to commit to an end state, anything to the Middle East, which is a very sensible position to take. On behalf of the Lowe Institute, thank you very much for all the time that you've given us. We've got a great deal of respect for the positions that you filled and the vision and energy that you've brought to the table in fulfilling those positions. And just thank you very much for the extraordinary amount of time that you've given us and the insights into U.S. foreign policy decision making. Roger, my pleasure at any time. Thanks so much.