 Hello again everyone. I hope you enjoyed this morning's session. I know that recovering diplomats like me have a very well-deserved reputation for being long-winded, but I'll do my best to break that stereotype this afternoon. I simply want to stress how delighted and honored I am to introduce our luncheon keynote speaker, Senator Tim Kaine. After the presidential campaign this fall, I think it's fair to say that Senator Kaine needs no introduction. So hundreds of town halls, campaign rallies, and media interviews and profiles, there's very little I can say that you don't already know. What I will say, however, is that there are relatively few elected representatives who make foreign policy and national security a priority, and there are fewer still who bring to those very complicated issues the extraordinary thoughtfulness, judgment, and integrity that Senator Kaine truly does embody. At this moment of partisanship and paralysis at home and dislocation and disorder abroad, we are deeply fortunate to have Senator Kaine's leadership in the Senate, and in particular in the armed services and foreign relations committees. And with so many consequential nuclear issues on these committees' agendas, from the implementation of the Iran deal to the crisis with North Korea, the forthcoming reviews of our nuclear posture and nuclear arsenal and so much more, we are especially fortunate to have him here with us today. So please join me in giving Senator Kaine a very warm welcome. Thank you. Hello. Thank you. I am thrilled to be here today. I was very honored to be asked because I'm a huge fan of the Carnegie Endowment. And as a member of the Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees in the Senate, I do travel around the world and I get superb advice from our own professionals in the State Department and the Department of Defense. But as you know, it's always important to get advice not just from your own team, but to go outside to stakeholders who can give you some third-party advice. And I always use Carnegie Bill. From the day I came into the Senate, you are one of my two or three go-to places to get the 360 view that I need to climb the learning curve and understand situations better. And I'm also a huge fan of Ambassador Burns, one of the greatest diplomats who's ever worn that title for the United States. So thank you for inviting me today to have a chance to visit. What I want to do actually, there's so many issues we could talk about and Ambassador and I will get involved in Q&A and extend it and maybe take some questions from you as well. But I want to talk about what Congress did on the Iran deal as a way of distracting some lessons that could be applicable to future situations. And I want to do this because we're about a year after implementation day. We can talk a little bit about how the deal is going. But this was a very interesting moment in terms of Congress trying to decide how seriously to take its obligations and the balancing of congressional and presidential power on important matters of diplomacy. I have a strong opinion about this. I think the U.S. to be the nation that we need to be, we have to be as vigorous in diplomacy as we are in defense and that includes humanitarian aid and economic posture. But I think we let the diplomatic muscle atrophy for some period of time. And one of the things that I strongly support about the Obama administration was that they decided to really reinvigorate the diplomatic muscle. And so if you look at the eight years of the Obama administration, three principal diplomatic deals that were really significant. The moving of the relations with Cuban to a new chapter, the moving of the relations with Iran to a new chapter with this deal. And then the U.S. effort through a colleague, Bernie Aronson, to accompany Columbia to end the Civil War in Columbia and create two continents without war for the first time in recorded human history, as far as I know. These are big accomplishments and the Obama administration put those in a very important priority within the administration. But on the Iran deal, I found myself, and I'll tell this story, I found myself in an unusual way kind of at odds with my friend, President Obama, because he began the negotiation for that deal in November, I believe it was of 2014, was it 2013 or 2014? 2013 when they announced that the negotiations were going to start and I strongly supported them. But I believe from the very moment if we ever got to a deal, it would be a deal that would need a congressional imprimatur and the White House believes strongly that they could do this deal on their own under an existing waiver power. As the deal progressed when it was first announced, I strongly supported the negotiations along with many of my colleagues, but there were many in Congress, as you remember, who were very against the notion of starting the deal. And not just in Congress, allies like Israel said it was a historical mistake of grave magnitude to begin these discussions. As the discussions continued, we got into 2015, and I had a conversation with the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee at that time, Bob Corker. And Bob knows me very well, very able diplomat in his own right. And he said to me, Kane, you are always banging on the White House for having this war going on against ISIL without a vote of Congress. How can you let the White House do a deal with Iran without a vote of Congress? He had introduced a bill basically establishing the proposition that no deal with Iran could be done absent an affirmative vote of Congress. And I said to Bob, I said, look, I agree with you that Congress needs to have a role. I just don't like the way you wrote the bill. I think you wrote the bill to create the hurdle too high and that a president has to have power to do diplomacy. And Bob, to his credit, said to me, well, if you think I've created too high a hurdle, take the bill that I've introduced and see if you can make amendments to your satisfaction and then see what I say. So my staff and I, and I've got some of my staff in the room, we took that as a challenge and we took the bill and then we rewrote it. And basically to kind of summarize, we made two fundamental changes to the bill. We basically said that Congress needed to give approval not to a deal with Iran, but we needed to give approval to any portion of the deal that led to the lifting of congressional sanctions because there were also UN sanctions and executive sanctions that we didn't have anything to do with and so we didn't need to necessarily say grace over, but to the extent that the deal with the lifting of congressional sanctions, we would need to have a role. And the second piece of the bill that we wrote that I proposed to Senator Corker was to switch the presumption. Instead of the deal would not go forward absent a congressional vote, we mandated a congressional vote, but basically said the deal would go forward unless Congress disapproved it. And under the normal Senate and House voting procedure, which would mean that if Congress disapproved it and the President vetoed it, then only if Congress overrode the veto would the deal in fact be disapproved. Basically as a matter of math, it, the bill that I proposed to Senator Corker, which he agreed on, established that the President could do a deal and as long as one third plus one in one of the bodies supported the deal, the deal would go forward. We established a hurdle, but it was a low hurdle and I would say an appropriately low hurdle because the Constitution gives the President significant discretion to do diplomacy. The day that I was going to introduce the bill to guarantee Congress a vote on this deal, in February of 2015 President Obama called me on the floor of the Senate in the middle of a debate on something else. He had already had me to his office twice to say do not do this. I do not need Congress and you are my friend. And if you introduce a bill saying I need Congress, it will be portrayed as one of my best friends in the Senate trying to counter one of the most important things that I'm doing as a matter of diplomacy. And we've had that conversation personally in his office and the day that I was introducing the bill, which I remember because it was my birthday, we're about to introduce it and I get a call the President wants to talk to you, go back to the cloakroom, he wants to chat with you. And we had this very, very intense conversation where he again asked me not to introduce the bill and told me that it would be a very bad thing and would get in the way of what was obviously an incredibly important diplomatic initiative. And I said to him, I said, Mr. President, look, if you can't get one third plus one in one body to agree that the deal you negotiate is good, that's not our problem, that's your problem. And he laughed and he said, well, I follow the math of your logic, but you're assuming an awful lot of rationality in the body that you happen to be serving it. You can never get, you can never get a good last line in with President Obama because he's so much faster than you are. And he came up with a good line that I had to laugh at and I said, okay, too, Shae, but I'm still introducing the bill. And the last thing he said to me, my friend, on that day was if that bill gets to my desk, I'm going to veto it. That then led to about a two month period where I made a lot of my friends nervous, including some folks here at Carnegie, others who really are pro diplomacy, who really saw the virtue of moving the relation with Iran into a new chapter, who really viewed a diplomatic deal as the best thing possible to check Iranians nuclear program. They really were worried that this would screw the thing up. And in fact, it wasn't only the White House that was worried, the Iranian negotiators, the Iranian foreign minister deeply, deeply worried about this. And I communicated with him as well. And I walked through the math of what it meant. And then one third plus one in one house is all that's needed. And if you can't get that, it's probably because the deal isn't very good. But it did create some anxieties. But I did it out of a strong belief that a deal with no congressional imprimatur would be a deal that would be easier to unwind. And that it was very important that we if we do a deal, that we do a deal that would be harder to unwind and not easier. From the day we introduced the bill with I think it was 12 senators equally divided between parties momentum built significantly. And by mid April of 2015, still months before the deal was actually negotiated. And I thought it was important to get the terms of review out on the table before there was a final deal. Because if once the final deal came, nobody would care about the process, we would just be talking about the terms of the deal. We got to the day of voting in the Senate. And at that point, it looked like the vote would be about 98 to one. And at that point, Dennis McDonough, the Secretary of State did call and say that they would not be vetoing the bill. They made a 98 to one vote. That was a very wise decision. They were going to have a hard time with it being that strong. And so in a bipartisan way, both the House and Senate overwhelmingly approved a role for Congress in the Iranian deal. But a role that was a low hurdle, not a high hurdle, because that would be appropriately deferential to the to the executives prerogative to do diplomacy. I remember walking off the floor after that vote, and it had gone from it's going to be clearly vetoed, don't do it to overwhelmingly pass, the White House is not going to veto it. And Lamar Alexander said to me, I'm a freshman senator, he said, I think you've just learned something really important. I said, what have I learned? Tell me what I've learned. He said, you may have learned that in the Senate, it's sometimes easier to find bipartisanship on something really important than on something really minor. I said, well, I'm not sure I've learned that, but tell me why I should have learned that. And here's what he said, he said, things that are important will often keep people at the table long enough to hammer out something that's good. You have to have a lot of patience. We had to be at the table for a long time to hammer this out. But we were kept at the table because the stakes were so high. Whereas things that are a little more minor, sometimes they don't keep you at the table long enough to hash out your differences. Well, we established the terms of review that Congress would only weigh in on matters pertaining to congressional sanctions. And a deal would go forward unless disapproved by Congress. And then months later, the deal hit the table. And then we had a very, very vigorous debate about it. And we cleared the threshold that we needed to. Many people were very upset and voted against it. Folks like me who thought the deal was a good deal to move forward, we voted for it. We cleared the threshold we needed to. And that put Congress's thumbprint of approval on the deal. So it wasn't just a matter of an executive that could immediately be reversed by the next executive. And I think that became very important that we do give the congressional approval for something that was of such significance. Here in the aftermath, it's one of the things that I've worked on in the Senate that I'm most proud of. I'm proud of it because it is about diplomacy. You know, the U.S. became the most powerful nation in the world economically by 1890 and probably by the Teddy Roosevelt presidency became the most powerful military in the world. But it was Teddy Roosevelt brokering the end of the Russo-Japanese War and Woodrow Wilson that put the U.S. into a position where we want to be engaged in diplomacy. And when we're at our best, we're using all of those tools in creative and interesting ways. I think it will be viewed as a real highlight of the Obama administration that they were willing to take this risky step to open up dialogue that had been frozen and try to find a path forward. I've continued to be involved in the monitoring of the deal. As a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, including traveling to Vietnam to be with the IAEA and understand what they do. I think this deal by dramatically reducing the number of centrifuges, dramatically reducing the amount of enriched uranium, disabling the Iraq facility, heavy water facility. But especially allowing a comprehensive and escalated inspections regime for 25 years and then a permanent accession to the advanced protocol of the NPT thereafter gives us the degree of transparency and information we need, not that it would ever be perfect about any nation, but gives us inspection and knowledge that we would ever need. Last thing I'll say about the deal and to make a couple of concluding comments to get into the discussion with Bill is about six months later I was debating this deal with John McCain, who's a friend. He's my chair on the Armed Services Committee. We feel very differently about the deal. He was very, very opposed to it and I was a strong supporter when it eventually hit the table. And he proceeded to get up and at a hearing or at a speech to a group like this went through everything that he thought was wrong about the deal. But the bottom line argument he made, the things he thought were wrong about the deal really boiled down to one. His view is you can't trust Iran. That's what he thought was wrong about the deal. And so when it was my turn to speak, I had originally intended to go through all the items in the deal that I really liked and to try to talk about why I ended up supporting it. But instead hearing his argument basically be one of trust, I said, well, okay, I'm going to come at this a different way. John McCain praised that I'm right and I'm afraid that he's right. The audience was kind of curious and McCain's like, okay, I wonder what he's got up. You know, when I said it like that, I said, John McCain praised that I'm right, that diplomacy works, because John McCain doesn't want to have a war over an Iranian nuclear program. So he praised that I'm right about this. We ended up in a different position that he really wants me to be right. And John said, well, that's true. I do want you to be right. And I said, and I'm afraid that John McCain is right. I have some fear that maybe we can't trust. And maybe there will come a day when because of an absence of trust, maybe we'll be proven right. And there will be need to contemplate military action to eliminate the threat of a nuclear weapons program in Iran. I'm afraid that John McCain may be right. But if we ever get to that day, I have to be able to look our troops in the American public in the face and say, we tried diplomacy first. If we get to that day, and I say, hey, I'm sorry, we walked away from a diplomatic table. We foreclosed an opportunity to do this peacefully. But now we have to take military action to stop a nuclear weapons program that could be destabilizing the world. That would be a very difficult thing to look people in the eye and say, especially since we already started one war over a nuclear program that turned out not to exist. I have a child in the military. I wanted two US senators that do. This is not something that's just theoretical. This is something that's very, very real. Harry Truman, as you know, the famous story Truman at the end of World War Two called the press into his office one day and said, hey, I want to show you all something. I've redesigned the seal of the presidency. The seal of the presidency we all know is the eagle with the arrows of war and one claw and the olive branches of diplomacy and the others. And in the aftermath of World War Two, Harry Truman reoriented the eagle's face so that it would permanently, permanently look toward the olive branches of diplomacy rather than what had been the case before where the eagles face permanently look toward the arrows of war. And he said, this is who we are as a nation in the aftermath of this horrible, horrible conflict trying to build the institutions like the UN and NATO. Now we are permanently orienting toward peace and diplomacy always with the arrow branches of war if we need them. But we have a preference. We have a default. That default should be diplomacy. That default should be peace. That's what the Carnegie endowment is, is been committed to since its formation. We are in very, very difficult and challenging times right now with a lot of question marks about the administration, a lot of question marks about places all over the world. But our posture should not change. That preference for diplomacy first is who we need to be. And that animated what we ended up doing in the deal with Iran. And even if not completely with passion and excitement, Congress grappled with this, decided that, yes, we have a role, but the role should ultimately be, if we can, to facilitate diplomacy and at least give diplomacy a chance. Look forward to talking to you and answering your questions. Thanks so much. Well, Senator Cain, thanks so much. Again, you've just given us a vivid reminder of why we're so lucky to have you in a leadership position of your thoughtfulness and integrity. I want to come back to the potential lessons of Iran diplomacy. But first, just ask a broader question. I mean, you rightly highlighted the significance of diplomacy as an instrument of American national security. The budget that the White House has just proposed, plus his up defense, but, you know, would embark upon some pretty historic cuts in diplomacy and development. Right. What's your impression of how this is going to play out? And is it possible to get a better balance? Because I know there are lots of people in the Congress who have strong views. Well, yeah, the budgetary proposal is a disaster in many ways. And I'll set aside the, you know, no Chesapeake Bay funding and Meals on Wheels funding being dramatically reduced, even though 500,000 Meals on Wheels recipients are veterans. And I'll set all that aside and just talk about the diplomacy and development side. That would be a disaster. I remember when General Mattis used to come before the SASC committee, in which I sit for posture hearings, and would he would be the better advocate for diplomacy and foreign aid than any of our State Department folks? He was so passionate about it. And he would always say, if you're going to cut anything on the development or aid side, just give it to me in more bullets. I wish you wouldn't cut it. But if you're going to cut it, you're just going to increase the possibility of conflict. So there are people in the administration who deeply understand this. And the good news is, there are also people in Congress who deeply understand it. You will find uniform democratic support for a strong budget to support diplomacy, development and foreign aid. But you will also find some very persuasive Republican champions. And I would put John McCain as one. Lindsey Graham is in a very important position because he's the lead Republican appropriator on the subcommittee that deals with these accounts. And he's been very strong on it in the past. I'm a little confused about the budgetary submission last week about whether the White House is now just done with the budget. Many of you know the budget gets negotiated by Congress and we don't even send it to the White House for signature. Last week may have been just about a speech of we're going to shrink the federal bloated federal bureaucracy. But they know this is now in Congress. And I'm not even sure that they're going to be that concerned about what we do with it. But there it is important for everybody to be nervous about this. But I would not be panicked about it because you do have not just Democrats but some great Republican leaders who understand the value of these investments. Thanks. Let me come back to Iran for a second and it's you know potential applications to the even more dangerous and imminent problem of North Korea its nuclear program the pace with which it's developing its missile program as well. I know the analogies are imperfect at best. But do you say as you look back over the experience of Iran diplomacy and your own connection to it. Do you think that there are lessons that might apply to dealing with the North Korea challenge. I do. And you know I've been very steeped in the Iran issue on the Foreign Relations Committee. I'm always very key to point this out. You can become a little bit of a creature of your region. And my region on Foreign Relations is the Middle East and North Africa and Latin America not Asia. So I don't consider myself the North Korea expert although I know you're going to hear from many today who are. But look the obvious lessons even in a very difficult difference situation are the power of multilateralism. The U.S. sanctions were really really important in getting Iran to the table. But those sanctions had they not been embraced by the international community would not have been powerful enough probably to get to Iran to the to the table. And then at the table even with nations like Russia where we've got a lot of challenges right now Russia was a real valuable ally in the P5 plus one process to get that deal. So the resumption of the of six party talks multi real multilateral effort is is sort of a it's necessary maybe not sufficient. But if we don't do that in a multilateral setting we're not going to get to the result we want. And the second thing is you have to look for the the main driver in the talks. Now I would say we were the main driver in the talks with Iran because it was the power of U.S. sanctions EU had sanctions UN had sanctions. Our sanctions were probably the ones with the most bite. The main driver in a regional talks about the North Korean program has to be China they're the ones that have the most leverage. One of the things that you get when you don't have diplomatic relationships is you lose a lot of leverage and even the sanctions that we have in place on North Korea. They sort of work you know third hand they're not as directly impactful as possibly the U.S. sanctions were in the Iranian context. You know I'm not saying anything that's unusual when I tell you I think China has sort of enjoyed a somewhat unstable North Korea. They like North Korea to be unstable enough to kind of rattle the cage of Japan, South Korea and the United States. But they don't want a North Korea that's so unstable that they cause the arming of the region by Japan and South Korea and they also don't want such instability that they might face a humanitarian challenge where a lot of North Koreans would be coming across the border seeking humanitarian refuge in China. So there's a degree to which they've tolerated a degree of instability but they won't tolerate more instability and my sense is that North Korea is kind of crossed over the unacceptable instability line and China is now becoming more engaged not so much because of what we're doing, they're becoming more engaged because they see what's happening. North Korea is more existentially challenging to them. Thanks. I don't want to monopolize the conversation. I know your time is short and we have I think enough time for one or two questions from all of you. So if you just raise your hand if you have a question wait for the microphone to come to you. Please be brief. Make sure to end with a question mark and identify yourselves at the start please. Bob Einhorn. Thanks Bill. I'm Bob Einhorn. I'm at Brookings now. Senator you spoke about the congressional role on Iran. I'd like to ask a question about the congressional role going forward especially on sanctions legislation. Yeah thank you. Members of Congress are now considering new sanctions legislation. Some proposals would be narrowly focused on Iranian behavior in the non-nuclear area. Yes. Solistic missile launches. We could do this consistent with the JCPOA. Some other proposals on the other end would not be consistent with the JCPOA like rescind licenses for Boeing and Airbus. And then there is a number of ideas in the middle. You know sanctions that might be technically consistent with the JCPOA for non-nuclear reasons but would would give the impression that the U.S. was interested in reimposing pre-JCPOA sanctions under a new non-nuclear label. If this impression gathered a lot of steam it would give the Iranians a pretext for scaling back their own nuclear commitments. So if you could tell us what is the current situation on the Hill with respect to sanctions and what's your view on what sanctions would be warranted. This question is like the most important question for Congress right now in dealing with Iran is Iran is engaged in behaviors that are completely outside of the nuclear file and outside of the agreement for which there needs to be a consequence. There has to be. And yet we have to be very careful about our actions because if it looks like what we're trying to do is just go back and well under a new administration we didn't really like that deal and so we'd like to kind of reimpose strictures then we will be behaving in bad faith and we could either lead Iran to walk away from the deal and start you know start spending centrifuges and enriching uranium again or we could really damage within Iran those that believe in peace and diplomacy that you know that the peace and diplomacy group in Iran also has serious political challenges and the last thing we would want to do would be to hurt those in any nation including Iran that believe in engagement and diplomacy. So this is a subtle distinction I supported at the end of last year the simple extension of the Iran sanctions act the deal called for the ability for our sanctions to snap back if Iran violates the deal the sanctions were going to expire so we extended even that extension caused Iran to say well this is going to be a clear violation of the deal you're not supposed to do it but we viewed that as sort of bluffing behavior we knew they understood there were going to be sanctions I supported the simple extension of the Iran sanctions but as we've looked and I've been glad to sign letters to the U.N. and others about missile testing that I've viewed as contrary to U.N. Security Council separate U.N. Security Council resolutions but I am very wary about signing on to other sanctions legislation we've got the sanctions in place now that needed to be in place to allow for snapback we do need to look for appropriate consequences for non nuclear behavior but broader sanctions legislation I think would be a mistake and I think our guide in this should be we did this deal with the P five plus one we were in it with a group of nations working together out of a belief that a deal that was done together would be more likely to stick if we're inclined to do something to try to impose a consequence on Iran for non nuclear behavior it's really good for us to have that dialogue with the P five plus one and make sure we can do it together but if we look like we're kind of you know going on our own that leads to a suspicion that what's happening is actually an effort to re litigate the deal so the communication with our partners is key and look strict enforcement of the JCPO is something that we all want we need to do that through the IAEA and other and other venues but if we get out a step with the partners who helped us get the deal that should be the little warning sign that maybe we're veering over into territory that that could cause the deal to unravel we have time for just one more question and let me learn a little bit blinded over in this direction yes please in the back I Steven young with the Unique Foreign Scientist thank you senator for your work on Iran and other things one hard question for you though on missile defense last year senator Cruz offered the amendment that struck the word limited from the 1999 National Defense Act and you would only to vote in favor of that amendment which in my view was a mistake limited the limit defense is the correct approach by parts of me around that in 1999 and this amendment I think opens the path to a far broader missile defense that might threaten stability with Russia space defenses all kinds of things we don't want can you talk about your think can issue in my support of the cruise man yeah so this was in May or June of 2016 and I'm going to have to kind of go back in my memory to so on that one here here is why I voted that way but I would be glad to have follow-up with your organization my office on it I viewed the that amendment as a little bit as a of a rhetorical tempest that didn't have a lot of carry forward meaning absent additional actions by the committee so look if the if the committee in the NDA or the appropriators in defense budget starts to put forth a dramatically different nuclear posture I'm going to have a vote on that I'm going to have a vote on it on the dollar side I'm going to have a vote on it on the strategic side the cruise amendment drop the word limited in a portion of the NDA in a way that I didn't feel was going to ultimately be that consequential so I didn't view it as that dangerous an amendment knowing that I would have the opportunity to actually be involved in anything that would implement and could look at implementation to determine if it was too aggressive or not senator I I keep one of my roles here is to bring to a close a fascinating conversation but thanks so much for your time today and for your leadership so please join me and thank you all very much appreciate it thanks