 So a lot of these issues are incredibly complex, and we're going to get into the details of them in a minute. But when you think about how to translate these kinds of issues for an audience, not this audience, but the domestic audience more broadly, how is it that you think we can go about or you'd like to go about explaining the importance of America's role in the world? For people who may rightly be focused on their own daily lives rather than these more abstract kinds of questions? Well, of course, I'm a believer that what happens in your daily lives will sooner or later be affected by these large questions, and that's why we need to have conversations like the one you're having at the Ford School. Let me just give a quick example of a way of thinking about a problem that's in the news right now and how to handle it differently. The other day, President Trump walked out into the south lawn of the White House and said that he'd just gotten off the phone with President Erdogan of Turkey, and he was withdrawing American troops from Syria. And everyone knew that that meant that the Turks would, as they have, launch a military assault into Syria with the purpose of trying to, in their view, contain and quell the Kurds who have been our allies in the fight against ISIS. This has been brewing a long time. This should not be a surprise that the Turks intended to do that. What is surprising is that the president of the United States basically gave them a green light to do whatever they chose to do. The way this could have been handled is to call a meeting at NATO, Turkey is a member, to get planners into this meeting led by Americans who wanted to support and, frankly, protect our Kurdish allies who have lost around 11,000 fighters in this ongoing battle against the militants and sit down with the Turkish government, their representatives, and say, look, your legitimate complaint is that you fear left unchecked there will be a Kurdish corridor on your border that will support those elements of the Kurds inside Turkey that you are concerned about and that you have a history of having to deal with their demands for autonomy, the terrorism that goes along with them. OK, that's your legitimate concern. We have a concern. These Kurds have been with us. They have fought with Americans. We have supported their efforts. They were the ones who really led the assault on Raqqa. They're the ones who are holding tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners. So let's figure out how we're going to deal with this. And let's make sure that you don't go in and, through air power and ground assaults, murder thousands of Kurds, both fighters and civilians, in your effort to try to prevent terrorism inside your own borders. Let's figure out how we can do this. Let's figure out how we can help you with your problem and how we can protect our allies. There are ways of working on really thorny, what are called wicked problems. But they take thought and deliberation and diplomacy. So yes, we have the common bound of NATO membership. We could have used that. And now we have a situation with all kinds of consequences, both predictable and unintended, that will flow from this military incursion by Turkish troops. I think you're exactly right. This problem of Syria is a wicked problem. It's been around for a long time. You can go back to the British and French drawing the boundaries of the region. But we're tracing it through. The Obama administration had very difficult choices to make in Syria. How much of this do you think the problem in Syria, can you trace the difficulties you had in the Obama administration? What do you think you got right and didn't get right about Syria then? And then again, I'm going to keep striving for that hopeful answer. Is there a path forward in the region that is for Syria and for Syrian refugees and Syrian people that is less brutal than the one they've been living with now for quite a number of years? Well, I can't give you a hopeful answer to that right now, because I think the brutality and the conflict will only intensify. And I fear that it will contribute to a resurgence of ISIS. They were driven from their main headquarters, and they were driven out of Mosul in Iraq. And a certain number of them were captured along with their women and their children. But by no means was that movement or that ideology defeated. So I fear that we're going to see some very difficult times ahead. So going back, look, this is one of the areas where I disagreed with the president, and I made my disagreements known privately while I was serving as Secretary of State. When Syria got started, it was a legitimate uprising by people who were protesting the actions of the Assad regime and some of their overreactions to rather minor protests. But the Assad government came in with a very heavy hand and tried to totally squelch protests. And the people who were in the streets at that time were predominantly business people, students, people who wanted more freedom than they were being permitted. Again, I think Assad, without giving up power or capitulating in any way, could have lessened some of the oppression that people were living under. But he chose a very different approach. And the approach he chose was in line with his father's approach, which is if there is protest, there is demonstration. You have to take the most draconian steps to squash it and send a message to everyone. And they were quickly joined by the Iranians and the Russians to support the Assad regime. And there are lots of reasons for that, one obviously that the Iranians had a longtime relationship with Syria and Assad because they used Syria as a pass through to equip Hezbollah in Lebanon. So they wanted to maintain enough control to be able to continue to support their allies in Lebanon, both internally in the role that they played in Lebanon and then, of course, always with the threat against Israel. The Russians had a long-term relationship with Syria with their sending students to study there back in the Cold War. They had a military base in Syria. So they saw it as an opportunity to buttress the Assad regime but also to get a foothold in the region. I, along with the then Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, the then CIA director, Dave Petraeus, recommended to the president that we take some steps through the CIA predominantly to try to send a message to Assad, the Iranians, and the Russians that they would face consequences. They couldn't just expect to slaughter tens of thousands of Syrians, force this huge exodus mostly into Europe, become a client state of Iran and Russia without the United States taking some action. And as you know, the president said the chemical weapons attacks were a red line. And then when it happened, he didn't think he could get support in Congress. And so he didn't proceed. So fast forward, at great human cost, in incredible devastation, the Assad regime, backed by the Iranians and the Russians, has hung on. The only part of Syria that they had not totally conquered was that northern part where the Kurds are and where other Syrians had gathered to try to fight against both Russian forces, particularly Russian air power, Iranian forces on the ground, advising the Syrians and the Syrian military. So at this point, I assume that Turkey has gotten the green light from Assad, the Iranians, and the Russians. So I assume they've de-conflicted the area so that there will not be any mistakes where Russian planes bomb Turkish troops. But you know, it's a complicated war zone. And nobody's quite sure what is going to happen. At this point, it would be very difficult to engineer a diplomatic solution, because the Iranians are not going to give up the gains they've gotten in neither other Russians. I actually negotiated an agreement in June of 2012 with all the parties and brought in the Gulf Arab states, and everybody was around the same table. And we negotiated a transition agreement. The Russian Foreign Secretary Sergey Lavrov was there. He actually agreed to it. We broke for lunch. He left. He went to his embassy. He called. We think Putin came back and disowned the agreement. So we have tried. We've tried to be an honest broker. We've tried to support internal opposition and those who have fled and are now expatriates. But where we are right now, and it's a very dangerous situation, is Assad has become basically a tool of both the Iranian and the Russian interests. And I think you will see increasing pressure on Israel from the Iranian interests. And you will see increasing arrogance and potential further threatening behavior from the Russians. And of course, we've got the Turks on the ground in a military battle. So it's an interesting time because a lot of the Gulf Arabs are so concerned about Iran that they have taken a lot of pressure off of Israel. So Israel and the Gulf Arabs actually have more in common now with their worry about Iran. But now on the doorstep of Israel, you've got an Iran dominated Syria. So this is going to be a difficult period and it requires intense intelligent diplomacy. And right now we have very little of that. And we're going to pay a big price.