 It is diplomacy that is the lead in terms of our relationships with other governments. Our ambassadors, who many of whom are equal rank to our flag officers in the military, play an important role. They are the president's personal representative overseas. So when you don't have an ambassador who is there to represent the president, our diplomacy becomes somewhat wobbly. Boston and the world is kind of what we're doing right now. That's global engagement and that's approaching critical topics of global importance, whether they emanate from here or far. And all of this is on behalf of our mission, which is fostering international engagement and global cooperation. So I thank you all for being here and doing this mission with us. We're so excited to have both of our speakers with us here tonight. A good friend of World Boston, Ambassador Nick Burns, has been with us a number of times. This is the first time that we've welcomed Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield and I just found out this is her first time in Boston. Way to come on the coldest day of the year. Wow. It gets better, really. Good evening. Well, let me say how delighted I am to be here. I really hadn't realized that I'd never been to Boston before until I came. I think I may have flown into the airport once, way back when going to Wellesley for Secretary Albright. But I've never been in the city and I look forward to coming back when the weather is a bit warmer. I'm from Louisiana, so this is a bit traumatic for me. So what I'd like to share with you tonight very, very quickly is kind of my experience during the first months of the new administration as a career officer. And really it started on January 20th, 2017. And I describe it as a traumatic day in the annals of the State Department and it's not because of who was elected, but because we learned on that day that six senior officers were being unceremoniously asked to leave their positions in the department. And the past career officers in Senate confirmed positions would usually stay in place until their replacements were named or they were reassigned to other positions because we were viewed as nonpartisan, as professionals. These six officers had combined close to 200 years of service to the U.S. government, having served in administration since President Reagan. I was spared, but not for long. And it became clear that there was serious distrust of career people who had served in the Obama administration. And after the departure of these first six, there was a consistent dripping of other seniors until almost all of the positions were vacant, save a few. So here's the problem. We lost years of service and experience from individuals, again, who had served in many administrations, not focusing on any partisanship. It was clear that there was no appreciation expressed to these dedicated officers, who many of whom were not even given a handshake as they walked out the door, given 24 hours to pack their offices. Their loyalty and their patriotism were questioned. There was vacant space being left by diplomats, particularly overseas, where many of our large embassies in large countries were without ambassadors to provide leadership, and many of those embassies are still vacant today. Professionalism and expertise were not valued. And as these changes have taken place, there was tremendous confusion and a lack of clarity on what was happening. In fact, many of us felt that we were in some kind of nightmare that we hadn't expected, because as I mentioned to Nick, my intention was to serve the administration, not being partisan in any way. As was mentioned, I served as Director General of the Foreign Service from 2012 to 2013, and that carried a lot of responsibilities in terms of trying to figure out how to maintain a flow of career people through the State Department so that we could prepare people for future positions. And we had experienced a bit of trauma in the early 1990s when there was a slowdown in hiring of entry-level officers. And when we finally resumed hiring, we ended up with what we referred to as a pig in the python, as we hired a huge number of people, but there were very few people in the middle and at the top. And this group of young people that we were hiring were kind of moving as one through this python with very little in terms of experience, mentoring, and support. So the damage that has been done to the department over the past year will take decades to repair, and we know it because we've done it before. I recall in 2014, President Obama said on his first trip to Africa, I was the Assistant Secretary at the time, that Africa needs strong institutions, not strong men. And I would repeat that statement on a regular basis to African leaders as I traveled across the continent, having visited all but five countries on the continent when I served as Assistant Secretary. I erroneously thought that our institutions were strong, but as I witnessed the dismantling of the State Department, I realized that one strong man can demolish even the strongest institutions. It took Rex Tillerson exactly one year to decapitate the State Department. And I think it will take generations to fix the damage that has been left behind. But what is important for me and many of the senior officers who have left the State Department is to encourage the young people who are still in the department and the young people at universities like Harvard to continue to pursue careers in the public service. For me, serving my country and serving my government has been the most rewarding part of my life. And I tell young people all the time that they will not go wrong if they stick this out. And at some point we're going to need them to fix the damage that has been done and to carry our diplomacy which so many people look to us for to carry that diplomacy forward. American leadership overseas is extraordinarily important. And it's particularly important in Africa where on a daily basis people live out of fear and need the voices of people across the world to raise concerns about human rights, press freedoms, individual rights, the rights of LGBTQ people, the rights of women across the continent. And America has been the voice that most people have listened to. So it's important that our diplomatic service continue to operate and be rebuilt so that we can continue to be the beacon of hope for people across the continent of Africa and across the world. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. It's a real pleasure to see all of you. Thank you for coming out in the cold evening and many thanks to Mary and to World Boston for her leadership, for her staff's leadership. When I spoke at the annual meeting in the autumn with the beautiful Boston Harbor behind us, we talked about the fact that World Boston has to exist because since the 17th century, since Boston and Cambridge were founded in 1630, our prosperity and our orientation has always been out towards the rest of the world. Across the Atlantic Ocean to the United Kingdom and to the continent of Europe to Africa to Latin America and of course around the world to Asia, our prosperity is a city still. If you think about our industries, biotechnology and healthcare and our universities, it depends on us having a sophisticated view of the world and World Boston helps us to accomplish that. So I'm really delighted to be here with all of you and salute Mary and her team for what they're doing. I'm also happy to accompany Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield to this evening. We're friends. We work together very closely in the administration of George W. Bush and we grew up in the Foreign Service at the same time. I started in the Jimmy Carter administration. I think that Linda started in the Ronald Reagan administration. We are truly nonpartisan. We were talking today. We never asked each other, who did you vote for? What party did you belong to? We took an oath. It was to the Constitution. It wasn't to any particular president. It wasn't to a political party. It was to the nation and to our Constitution. And I think when Linda talks about the fact that people were summarily fired in the first week of the Trump administration, that's a direct contradiction to everything our civil service and our Foreign Service has stood for. So we're going to talk tonight about the importance of diplomacy in our world today, American diplomacy and leadership, the importance of having a strong State Department, but in my very brief time at the podium before we had that conversation, I wanted to say one word about the State of our country. I'm worried about the direction in which we're heading. We are the global leader. We have the largest and most innovative economy. We have the most powerful military. We have a great diplomatic core and we have a lot of responsibility for the stability of the world, peace of the world, our collective ability in the world to achieve great things like justice and like peace and avoidance of conflict. A lot depends on us. It doesn't mean we have to be the world's policemen. We shouldn't be. It doesn't mean that we have to be in the center of every conflict. We can't be. But it does mean when America looks out and sees a vital interest, we have to be there. And if you think about what made us great from the Second World War when, and our good friend Douglas Alexander is here, was in the Labor Party and the Parliament and will be speaking at the Harvard Kennedy School in the next two days. Douglas is up in the fourth row. Right here you might just raise your hand. You know, Britain played this role for 150 years as the greatest world power and Britain and the United States and Japan and Poland. Looking at the members of the, in South Korea, the members of the consulate corps here, we played this role together over the last 75 years. What made America a great partner to those countries and a great power was four things, four building blocks. Number one, we believe in alliances. We believe in the creation of NATO. NATO is turning 70 on April 4th of this year. We believe in the power of that alliance to deter Soviet communism and now to deter Vladimir Putin. And our alliance with the Republic of Korea and Japan and Australia. We have an Australian student, my teaching assistant, Aaron Greger here tonight to keep the peace in Asia. And those alliances were the power differential. They are the power differential between the United States and the authoritarian powers, China and Russia. We believe in alliances. We believed, second, in free trade, that free trade across regions and the globe would lift millions of boats and they have. We've had unparalleled prosperity in the last 75 years. Third, we believed, and think of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher from Douglas's country, the United Kingdom, we believe that as democracies we had to support democracy around the world and nurture it and push it forward. And fourth, we believe that we are an immigrant nation and a refugee nation that every one of us has an immigrant or refugee story. Our African American population has a different story brought to this country in chains as slaves. But we all came from someplace else and therefore the work of World Boston is just to attract people to this country. We believe that immigration and refugees enriched us. I would submit to you that we are going backwards on all of those four core responsibilities and those foundation stones that made us great. The current president, President Trump, is disavowing our alliances. He's disavowing free trade and has dismantled our free trade agreements in Asia, Europe and here in North America. He has failed to defend democracy by aligning himself with anti-democratic populace in places like Hungary and Italy and Turkey and disavowing the great democratic leaders of Europe, Angela Merkel, Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron and our friends, the Canadians, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He has demonized immigrants and demonized refugees. And I'm worried that we're going backwards. And I would just conclude this short statement that Linda and I have both been invited to make by saying this, we need to believe that we can make a difference in the world. Linda and I both worked for Condoleezza Rice, someone that we admire greatly, who's a great public servant. I interviewed Secretary Rice 18 months ago and asked in Colorado in a public forum like this and I asked her a simple question. I said, what are you worried about? And I thought she'd say Iran, North Korea and Putin. And without missing a beat, she said, we've lost our self-confidence. We've lost our self-confidence. If you think about it, we're no longer the country supporting the young, embattled democracies. We've become the chief critic of NATO, not the chief supporter of NATO. We've demonized Mexico and Mexicans in the public statements of our president. We've lost our self-confidence. And so we need to regain that self-confidence. That however imperfect we are and we make a lot of mistakes as a country and we've participated in some of those mistakes. But more often than not, we're a force for good in the world. The person who really understood that was a great prime minister from Douglas's country, Winston Churchill. He came here to Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 6, 1943. He came to Harvard to receive an honorary degree after meeting FDR in Washington. And that was a pivotal point in the Second World War because the British had stopped Ramel at LLMain, west of Alexandria, Egypt. Germans weren't going to get the Middle East oil fields. And the Soviets had stopped the German 6th Army at Stalingrad and so the Germans weren't going to get the Caspian oil fields. And the war was turning in the Allied direction. Indeed, Italy would fall, Mussolini would fall two days later. Churchill came to Harvard and gave a speech to Harvard students where he essentially said, we've been, we the United Kingdom have been the great power. You are now the United States, the great power in the world. And he said to the Harvard students, if you want to be great, the price of greatness is responsibility. The price of greatness is responsibility. What's the message for us today? We've got to be in the Paris climate change agreement. We've got to be back in the Iran nuclear deal because that's the best way to stop the Iranians. We have to think of Mexico and Canada as virtuous neighbors, not as enemies and competitors. And here's how Churchill concluded that speech to the Harvard graduates on September 6, 1943. One cannot rise to be the leading country in the civilized world without being involved in its problems, convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes. I think we can be that country again, but it's going to take all of us to bring us back and bring the State Department back to what we had and what we must have to be a responsible global citizen. Thank you very much. Now I'm on, I think. You are. Okay, great. Thank you both so much for your statements. As I anticipated, we have an awful lot to talk about, but we can try and pare it down. Linda, I was wondering if you could, given your up close and personal experience in 2017 and then earlier as a person with unique view on the State Department as Director General of the Foreign Service. So we met here on this topic about a year ago, and things looked bad. Maybe the State Department budget would be cut by a third. I think in the next article, Great Decisions article, you noted something like applications for the Foreign Service had declined by two-thirds, ambassadors quitting, senior members quitting, ambassadorships unfilled. Now, a year later, Congress made a decent appropriation last year by partisan support for the State Department. That's good. We have a new Secretary of State. So we're fine now, right? We're not fine. We're better, but we are not fine. As I said in my comments, it's going to take a decade to roll back some of the changes that took place. And while what is happening in the State Department is not getting as much press as it used to get, there are still some attacks and efforts being made to dismantle parts of the State Department. So, for example, the office that deals with refugees, population refugees and migration, the budget of that office in the current budget was significantly cut to the point that it is not clear that the office will continue as it exists today. And none of us are opposed to change, but it has to be done in a strategic way that helps to improve the operations of our programs, not destroy the operations of our programs. We are also, again, while the new Secretary, and I give him a lot of credit for coming in and trying to bring this, what do you call the swagger of the State Department back, it hasn't happened yet. Because as foreign policy options are being pursued overseas, it is not being done in the context of including, in a significant way, our experienced foreign service officers. We still do have a number of large embassies that are vacant. I know in the case of Africa, South Africa, one of the most important countries on the continent, Cote d'Ivoire, another important country on the continent, Tanzania, all of those countries do not have ambassadors. And I know in Europe there are, as well as in Asia, there are posts that are still yet to be filled. Okay, thank you. I want to pursue that a little bit in the following way. I think it's maybe hard for the rest of us to understand kind of why this matters. We all think intuitively, understand the importance of our armed services, best in the world, amazingly skillful and brave, all over the world. Foreign service officers are also officers. And Swear, as Nick mentioned, an oath to the Constitution. They're not attached to the President or a sovereign. Maybe you could help us understand a little bit how these two aspects of American reach or power do or should work together on the ground, say in Liberia or wherever. Absolutely. Secretary Clinton used to talk about the three-legged stool, and that those three legs are diplomacy, defense, and development. And the legs have to be even if the table is going to be stable. And what we've seen happen in recent years is that we have a very unstable table because all three of those legs, all three of those twos are important to how we project our power and our interest overseas. The important leg of that stool, diplomacy has become way too short. And it is diplomacy that is the lead in terms of our relationships with other governments. Our ambassadors, many of whom are equal rank to our flag officers in the military, play an important role. They are the President's personal representative overseas. So when you don't have an ambassador who is there to represent the President, our diplomacy becomes somewhat wobbly. And we do have career people who support the ambassadors, our Deputy Chief Admissions, our political officers, but they are not the personal representative of the President. And in countries in Africa, for example, we have had to rely on our military in some cases to take the lead. You want to go into a meeting with the President. You're not going to have a mid-level officer take the lead when you have a flag-rank general in the room. And so your flag-rank general is the person that's projecting our diplomacy overseas. And while our interests should be the same, we should not be projecting a face of the military as the face of our civilian representation overseas. I work very closely with Africa, the Africa Command and the four generals, including the current one, as they worked in Africa. And we work very closely together. They are an important tool for us. They bring resources to the table that we, on the diplomatic side, don't always have in our own toolboxes. They have money that we don't have. They can bring the things that sometimes governments need to feel that we're paying attention to them. So we have to work hand-in-hand with them. We have to work hand-in-glove with them so that our power is projected in a consistent and unified fashion. But it can't just be the military projecting our power overseas. Nick, did you want to reflect on that at all? What it's like when you're actually in an embassy and how the military and the diplomats have to work together and rely on each other? Well, I think that our wisest presidents and secretaries of state and defense have understood that American power overseas is often a function of the integration of the military and our diplomacy. And sometimes diplomacy takes the lead and sometimes the military does, but they're inextricably bound up with each other. We both work for Secretary Colin Powell, another person I greatly admire. He used to say, you know, 35 years in the U.S. military before he became Secretary of State, he used to say the proper way to think about what Leonard just talked about, our assets are, our diplomats should be on point, our military should be in reserve. We should always try to exhaust peaceful means using diplomacy in a crisis. And if the diplomats can't succeed and the interest is vital and the country's security is at risk, you call in the military. I think what happened to us, back in it, 18 years later after 9-11, you noted I was at NATO on 9-11, what happened to us is that we were angry and rightfully so. We've been attacked in New York and Washington. We had lost 3,000 people. It was a direct terrorist threat to the country. We came out swinging. It ended up in being an 18-year engagement, our longest war in Afghanistan that's not yet finished. We're still there. And our allies, by the way, are still with us and they're all still there. Eight years' occupation in Iraq, then we left, now we came back in 2014, still there. And I think in retrospect, we probably overused the military. I think the military feels this very keenly. One of the things we do at the Kennedy School, we have a lot of major, kernel level men and women who come to us for military, for training, national security training for a year, before they go back into the officer corps. Many of them are in my class. When I sit down with them one-on-one, I'll say, where have you been since 9-11? Five, six, seven combat tours. This is the most intensively deployed generation of American military officers in the history of the United States. We've overused them. We need to regain the balance, fully fund state, build up our resources because if you think about it, we have about 2.5 million Americans serving the military. About 1.5 million active duty, about a million, maybe a little bit more, reserve. There are 8,000 of us foreign service officers. We don't need 2 million foreign service officers, but we probably need more than 8,000 because we have diplomatic relations with nearly every country in the world. We have 285 embassies and consulates around the world. They're doing vital work for the country. So you need a budget and you need public support for that and that's one of the reasons why we're here tonight. To argue that we're worth it. You need to train them so you need more so that you can have this training float like the military does so that our people are prepared. So I was wondering, just to illustrate what you're talking about, it just came to my mind. Say on that day, that awful day, September 11th, Ambassador to NATO. And this is a military attack, as you say. Terrorist attack. What is it that, for example, the Supreme Allied Commander could not have done without you? Why did they need you? Why doesn't the military just swing into action without the help of ambassadors, etc.? This was an extraordinary day for NATO. I think everybody knows what NATO is. It was brought into being by President Truman and the Allies in 1949 because we felt we had to contain Stalin. There was a fear that the Russians, the Soviets would attack Western Europe in the 40s or 50s or 60s or 70s or 80s. And so we formed a military alliance. By 2001 it was 19 countries. Now it's almost 30 countries. And the core of that alliance is Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, the NATO Treaty. And one of us shall be deemed an attack on all of us. And so the Soviets knew that if they attacked West Germany or Italy or Denmark, they would face the United States military in the 40s and 50s for all the way on. We never had to use invoke Article 5. The Soviets never attacked because we were too strong and united in NATO. And the great irony of the NATO Treaty is that the only time we've been invoked in the history of the alliance was September 12th, 2001. We were 6 hours ahead in time of Washington and New York. We got the news in the early afternoon. By late afternoon my Canadian colleague David Wright had called me to say, have you thought about invoking Article 5? I said, well, I only want to do that. If there's unanimity, we don't want to have allies disagree on whether to defend the United States on September 11th, Brussels time. Every ally had pledged to defend us and to go to war with us. And at that point, President Bush had not yet actually said it was Osama bin Laden in al-Qaeda whom had attacked us. And early the next morning we were all ready to vote. We're going to invoke Article 5. We're going to go to war together. And I called Condoleezza Rice, who was the National Security Advisor. I said, Condi, I think I need the President's authorization. We're all going to fight al-Qaeda. She said, go for it. I said, thank you. I really think I need President George W. Bush's authorization because they all think they're going to war with us. She said, go for it. I said, but Condi, and she caught me off, she said, Nick, the President had a really bad day. It's four in the morning and Condi had not had any sleep. She said, go for it. And I took that to be my instruction from the President. Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor. Before we hung up the phone, she said something that I've never forgotten. She's written this in her memoir. She said, it's really nice to have friends in the world. When the chips are down, they were there for us. The Canadians, all the Europeans, so maligned by President Trump now. And they all went into Afghanistan with us. They have suffered more than 1,000 combat deaths. Some of the countries represented here, I'm looking at my friend the Polish Consul General, his country's been there. Still there with us 18 years later. You can't buy this kind of support in the world today. That's why we need a strong State Department. We needed a civilian ambassador, a civilian Secretary of State to be able to pull all that together. This is what diplomacy is. And so those were conversations among diplomats when your friend David called you. I'm going to go back for the U.S. military. We work hand in glove. The military didn't have anything to do with this decision. This was a civilian decision made by civilian officials, diplomats in 19 countries and the heads of government, including President George W. Bush. That's one example of what diplomacy does for people. Thank you. Nick, I wanted to touch on something about the responsibilities that come with greatness. How we've moved backwards on our four core responsibilities. That's a you're looking at the world in a very moral fashion. There's a real politic is also a popular way of looking at the world. Could we say these days that things are kind of different? Okay, the Afghan war is ending. We're in negotiations. ISIS is on the run. NATO is increasing. The members are increasing their payments from the point of view of we've started negotiations with North Korea. So from our own point of view in the United States maybe we're taking care of the country. I admire you for that. Look, I don't want to sit here and say that everything Donald Trump has done is wrong. I think Donald Trump has been right to ask the NATO allies to pay more on their defense. I think he's been right to observe that China is a predatory trade nation. I think he was right to try diplomacy with Kim Jong-un. He's been in a diplomatic decision about now. He decided he would go on a diplomatic track and we were certainly better off there than threatening nuclear war between each other. But if you look at, if you judge the president on what he's actually accomplished he's weakened the NATO alliance. And he's failed at any time in his presidency to criticize Vladimir Putin and the Baltic countries and our friends Ukraine and Georgia who he's occupied their territory. He's failed to do that. He's never criticized Putin for Putin's cyber attack on our 2016 election and our 2018 midterm congressional election. He's dismantled the international trade regime and so the lead story in the New York Times this morning is we have an historically high trade deficit because the president has mayhem and chaos in the international trade system so that a lot of countries are buying fewer American goods because of the economic uncertainty. And on and on and just one thing I'll mention on democracy I've been into eight countries in Europe over the last eight or nine months and when you go through Western and Eastern Europe now the existential issue are these anti-democratic populace Marine Le Pen and France and alternative for Deutschland and Germany they are attacking the idea of democracy that we believe in and our president is aligning with the anti-democratic populace against Angela Merkel against Emmanuel Macron it's that bad so my grade is he's failing us he is failing the United States and we've had a bipartisan consensus from Harry Truman on all of our Republican and Democratic presidents have thought we need to believe in free trade our alliances, democracy we should take in about 100,000 legal immigrants a year we interview them we know Linda and I have interviewed legal immigrants and refugees we know who they are President Obama has taken in about 70,000 refugees a year we know who they were we had interviewed them in families they built small businesses and our president is deconstructing our policy in those four areas I'm worried about the country on a non-partisan basis worried about the direction in which we're heading okay thank you well as I said there is so much to talk about but I think probably our wonderful world boss and community members have a lot on their minds as well so we'll take some questions so a couple of things please speak your question into a microphone that will magically appear with one of my colleagues and your question should end with a question mark so because we have time for discussion upstairs so do we have any questions oh many many many okay let's start with you miss in the middle no yes and then actually why don't we take two at the same time so we'll start with you and then we'll go to Raoul okay so when you're done with your question you can yes you absolutely you then you can pass the mic on to Raoul next to you hi my name is Sarah Kelleher thank you for being here today so I have a question about what you mentioned with vacancies around the world at embassies abroad have been detrimental to our foreign policy and specifically withholding our power and influence and interest in those countries can you think of any examples where just in the past few years because of that vacancy that other countries powerful countries maybe Russia, China have gained more power and their interests have taken over or have been you know more important than ours okay thank you I'd like to turn to two institutions and ask you what you think about their operation now one in the State Department and one across the communities that serve to generate initiatives to coordinate policy to recommend new things that are important the policy planning staff of the State Department as it has been known on and off and the National Security Council what is the health of those institutions in helping us develop the right kind of diplomatic and national security policies we need do we love the world Boston community you want to take the first one great okay so just focusing on Africa where there's feeling among Africans that we have turned our backs on them we're seeing the Chinese move in fast and furiously you look at the Belton Road initiative the other investments Chinese are building up their diplomatic presence on the continent of Africa when we are decreasing our own diplomatic presence in Central Africa Republic where there is an ongoing civil war they did just sign a peace deal hopefully it will last the Russians have moved in and that came as a surprise to many of us how quickly they moved into Central Africa Republic the Chinese I don't think there's a country in Africa where they're not proactively working on infrastructure and these are things that we have not traditionally worked on on the continent of Africa and if you look at the policy that the National Security Advisor Bolton outlined in the speech in December the Africa policy many people refer to it as the China policy because the policy is about competing with China there's some discussion of investment there's some discussion of security but it's about competing with China and my view is that should not be our goal to compete with China and Africa should be to up our own game on the continent of Africa to make our presence known our interests known and also to continue to engage with the people of Africa in a way that has been traditionally very successful for us I would just give the examples you remember when the Saudi journalist Saudi American journalist because he was an intending immigrant permanent resident of our country in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul we did not have an American ambassador in Turkey or in Saudi Arabia and we had this great crisis among the three countries over who did what who do we believe when you have someone like Linda as the resident ambassador who truly knows a country say the way Linda understood Liberia when she was the American ambassador there we would have had a career person sort of figured out rather quickly what had happened and how to act how to frankly threaten the Saudis and how to reassure in a way the Turks and yet we didn't have those senior ambassadors because the posts were vacant because no one had ever been nominated because they didn't the Trump administration didn't care I'll give you another example when the president went to Singapore to meet Kim Jong Un these last eight months and he said this is the senior career official in charge of the region Linda was the American assistant secretary of state for Africa so she was in charge of our policy in every country we didn't have that person and I would just conclude Mary by saying if you believe the press and I do because I don't believe in anything called fake news I believe in the freedom of the press but I also believe in the integrity of the press what the press has been reporting consistently is that the president doesn't read his intelligence briefing in the morning he has been openly dismissive of the CIA and the National Intelligence Council he's been dismissive of the FBI he's been dismissive of our generals who unanimously said don't pull the 2000 special forces out of eastern Syria that's our way to block Iran and the president tweeted out in December I'm pulling the troops out and his most important and most effective cabinet officer Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in protest because he wasn't being listened to I don't think we've ever had a situation in modern American history certainly not in the last century 150 years where a president hasn't listened to the people that we appoint as our career military intelligence and diplomatic officers and that's the situation we have today watching Fox News and it sounds it's bizarre but if you track the tweets they track the TV and he has thousands of people who are nonpartisan who are dying to give him advice just send him memos talk to him and he doesn't talk to them and doesn't read their memos it's that bad so that actually goes kind of to Raoul's question about the staff National Security Council Any thoughts on those I think the one institution that has been able to hold itself together is the United States military mainly because Congress has been very supportive and the president hasn't been able to fire individual generals the way he's fired people but our institution that we care deeply about has been traumatized people summarily fired as Linda has said and the president has tried to cut the budget 31% both the last two years and the silver lining here is that Republican committee chairs have blocked him and Republicans and Democrats have worked together to restore State Department funding I testified before Senate Foreign Relations Committee a couple of months ago about NATO and Russia Republican committee chairs and senior Republican senators have blocked the president on Russia when the president didn't want to sanction Russia over the cyber attack the Senate voted 98 to 2 to impose sanctions on Russia the only two senators who didn't vote is an interesting odd couple Rand Paul who's really an isolationist and our very own New England senator Bernie Sanders they voted not to sanction Russia every other senator did but the United States a woman who was a Biden ARE the President I think the president is completely out of step with the Republican leadership when it comes to Foreign Policy not domestic policy Foreign policy let's see maybe two quick questions is this ambassador or Simon? right So at least that will be the second question and then we'll start down here. Tom Simons, another retired Foreign Service officer. My question is for Linda, maybe both, but is there any thought or is there any option of rehiring some of the talent that's been fired or passed out because rather than wait the 10 years to train another cohort for the senior positions, there are people out there who might be willing and interested in coming back? That is a possibility, and it's happened in the past where we bring retirees back either as retired annuitants or we bring them back in limited reappointments as career officers. But that requires them to want to come back. And while I do think people are dedicated, when I talk to my colleagues like myself who left the State Department, they're bruised and still somewhat in shock at what occurred. And I will say in Secretary Pompeo's, in support of him, he did call some people to come back and ask some to come back, but you're out for a year or a year and a half and it's hard to, as I said, to put a bullet back inside of a gun after you've fired it off. And so you've moved on, you've launched yourself. But I do think that if there is a concerted effort to bring people back, we will see some people make the decision to come back to help. I would make that decision in a heartbeat. I don't know that I would want to go back permanently full time, but if I'm asked to go back to help, I would leave what I'm doing, including my new grandbaby for a short period of time to help out. Okay, and then up here. Thank you for your rallying cry. I guess my question has to do with this sense that this distressing situation may be part of a reckoning that we face in the United States. And I am sure that you both may know of examples of people, diplomats past, present, who are showing some courage in our current circumstances. And I think as we are asked, all of us, to rise to the occasion that we need the examples of people who are courageous in some way on this issue. So I wonder if you can tell us anything about examples you have. You know, we have diplomats serving all over the world who are continuing to work under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Many, I'm told, are not getting guidance, but they're still engaging. They're still using the resources that they have at hand to carry out their diplomatic responsibilities. And we should commend them and we should thank them. Wendy Sherman once said in the speech, and I think you know Wendy, she was in the job that Nick was in as the Undersecretary for Political Affairs. And I heard her say in the speech that, like we commend our military and thank our military for their service, foreign service officers should be regularly thanked for their service. I recall back in the 1990s when General Shalikashvili came for a visit to Geneva when I was there, the Iraq War hadn't started. And he said to me, more diplomats have died in the line of duty in the past few years than military. We still die in the line of duty. I think often of Chris Stevenson and I think even more often of the 10 Americans who were killed in the bombing in Nairobi, Kenya in 1998. I think of the American who was killed in the church bombing in Pakistan a year after I left Pakistan. We don't wear a uniform, so you don't know who we are. But when you do, take the time to stop to thank people for their service to our country. So I think we have time for one more question. All right. Yes, you, ma'am. There's a mic coming. OK. Thank you very much. Mary Ellen Washanko, Westwood, Massachusetts. OK. A basic question of a foreign service officer right now who can apply to the State Department. And if you can, that will be my question and then I can make a comment. My question would be, can you enlighten us of the present situation of someone and their application? The reason I ask is because we have a personal experience. My daughter and her husband are serving with the United Nations in Nairobi, Kenya and have been with the UN for five years. My son-in-law, her husband, was applying actually for the Foreign Service Department around the five, four years ago, around the time they started in Africa. He went through all the rigorous, competitive two-year application process. He speaks about five foreign languages. He went to Washington for the three-day interview and he passed that. He was accepted. Within the year, Trump came into office and there was a freeze with Tillerson on accepting any new foreign service officers. So where are we now with that freeze? He lost. We lost. Our country has lost. Someone who's experienced, who's 39 years old, who is willing to serve and because of the present government. So can you address that? The question then of where are we with that freeze? And as we were talking about earlier, the incoming wannabe new foreign service officers. I will say this. I agree with Linda. Secretary Pompeo has tried to rebuild the State Department. He's an institutionalist. He's a West Point grad. He was CIA director. He understands us. And he's tried hard to rebuild. But he doesn't have a president supporting him. Before President Trump came in and President Obama's last year, we have been averaging about taking in about 375 junior officers, new officers a year. In the first year when Linda was still there, we took in 101 officers. So you can see the loss. You can see the loss of potential, all the people who wanted to serve. And we need to get those numbers back up because if you don't take in people every year, you see 10, 20, 30 years down the road, we're not going to have the trained mid-level and senior officers. And I'll just tell you, we have thousands of young people in this country, women and men who want to serve. And I see them every day at the Harvard Kennedy School. And some of them are here tonight. And they want to serve their country. They want to, you know, that call at Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt said that the credit belongs to the man or woman in the arena of public service so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. You know, you've got to get into the arena of public service. You've got to serve. You've got to give back to your country. And we have Americans at the Harvard Kennedy School who are turning down lucrative jobs in the private sector to make the modest wages that federal government employees make because they want to serve their country. But we need a president who believes in them and a Congress that will allocate the money to support the foreign service. That's why we're here tonight. And I say to your son-in-law not to give up because the service will come back and we will resume recruitment. And I know it can be discouraging and particularly that he got so far and the system just stopped and froze completely. And really, the 101 we've brought in took a tremendous amount of effort to push the administration to understand that it was important that we continue to bring new blood into the foreign service, new ideas into the foreign service. So tell him not to give up hope and to keep trying and we'll cross our fingers with you that he makes it. Okay. And on that note, I think we should really thank our veterans of the arena. Thank you.