 This is a pleasure for me, and I know brings many people in the room back to serving with you all over the world for many years I want to start with It's also so nice of you to host me here at Carnegie It's so nice. It was a short commute for me, a short commute for you, so it was quite convenient I want to start with a topic that has been in the news quite a bit As we all have seen on Sunday, the Attorney General Bob Barr released a summary of the Mueller report Well, there will be a lot of political analysis in this town, no doubt There is an underlying question here, and I want to step back with you What about Russia's involvement in the 2016 election? As we look ahead, what do we need to understand about Vladimir Putin's worldview And why he interfered in the 2016 election, and what does it mean for us now? Well, first it's great to be with you, Jen, and thanks to all of you for coming today You know, in my experience over many years, Vladimir Putin is in many respects kind of an apostle of payback And so, you know, in a sense I think his perspective has been animated by the conviction Going back the two decades that he's been Russia's leader That the West and the United States in particular took advantage of Russia's moment of historical weakness in the 1990s And then continued to take advantage Again, this is not a justification for his perspective, but you don't have to accept it or indulge it You've got to understand it if you want to understand Putin And so in a sense when he saw an opportunity in 2016 to take advantage of the dysfunction and polarization in our political system Which he didn't invent, but he's an adroit counterpuncher You know, he was going to do that, and you know, Putin is a formidable figure I remember my first meeting with him in 2005 as the newly arrived American ambassador in Moscow And so you go through this ceremony called the Credentials Presentation Where you take the letter from the President of the United States to present to the President of Russia and the Kremlin And as many of you know, the Kremlin is built on a scale that's meant to intimidate visitors and especially newly arrived ambassadors So you go walking through these huge halls and long corridors And eventually you come up to these two-story bronze doors And you're kept waiting there for a minute just to let this all sink in And then the door cracks open a little bit and out comes Vladimir Putin Now Putin, you know, despite his bare-chested persona is not an especially intimidating figure in person He's about five, six, although he does carry himself with great confidence So he comes through the door as his habit, looking you straight in the eye And before I got a word out of my mouth, let alone handed over my letter, he said You Americans need to listen more, you can't have everything your own way anymore We can have effective relations, but not just on your terms And you know, in my experience that was vintage Putin, unsubtle, almost defiantly termless But there was a point to that, but there was a point to that And that was that, you know, he's going to push back and get even And so that's the backdrop, in a sense, to the opportunity that he saw in 2016 I think he succeeded beyond his wildest imagination I think he was as surprised probably as President Trump was on election night But I think that's also a preview of what's to come Not just in terms of the potential he sees to take advantage of dysfunction in our democratic system But also in Europe and other places Because I think in his view, the way to create space for Russia as a major power on the international landscape Is to chip away at an American-led order and take advantage, as I said before, of our own dysfunctions So this is going to be a challenge for some time to come Well, I'm certain we'll have some questions about Russia, given your background as former ambassador But I want to move on to one other issue that's been in the news before we dive into the book Elections are coming up next month in Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu was in Washington this week And as we all saw, President Trump made an announcement about that the Golan Heights should be recognized as a part of Israel What impact could that have on the elections in Israel and on the prospects of a peace agreement? How should we see that from a broad diplomatic perspective? I think in general that the U.S. decision, the decision President Trump announced yesterday to formally recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights creates more problems than it solves And I mean that in the following sense When you look at the bloody chaos in Syria today, Israel faces zero pressure to come down off the Golan Heights Which it's controlled for over 50 years And no one in their right mind will push for that today There's, you know, the distant possibility if you're an optimist that a post Bashar al-Assad government in Syria might be prepared to engage seriously But in that sense, the decision the President announced was a short-term political boost for Prime Minister Netanyahu And what is a pretty sharply contested reelection campaign in Israel But it's symbolic in the sense that it doesn't add anything of practical value to Israeli security The downsides, it seems to me, are at least threefold First it does in a sense provide a favor to Bashar al-Assad and to the Iranians You know, Bashar is desperate to change the subject from the pain and bloody mindedness he's inflicted on his own people Over the last seven or eight years The Iranians are always looking for an opportunity to kind of rejuvenate their narrative of resistance to Israeli occupation So in a sense it's a favor to them, they get to change the subject or try to Second downside I think is the question of precedent You know, international law gets billaried sometimes and belittled, but it does matter in some respects And an important principle is that territorial questions like this, you know, have to be solved peacefully through negotiations And, you know, this kind of a decision is going to get used by the Vladimir Putin's of the world To say, well, what's wrong with annexation of Crimea? You know, if Israel's unilateral annexation of the Golan can be recognized And then the third and last downside I think is, you know, I'm a bit skeptical of what the peace plan that's, you know, been discussed a lot And which will emerge I assume eventually from the White House about Arab-Israeli peace and Palestinian-Israeli peace But this isn't going to make it any easier to sell that plan to Arab states as well As I said, I'm a bit skeptical that you're going to see this great, you know, outrush of enthusiasm from Arab states About the proposal that comes out of the White House, but it'll provide an excuse, you know, for Arab states to duck and cover I think on this issue too And for anyone here or listening who's interested in delving in more to this issue and others We have a lot of memos and unclassified cables that are available also on burnsbackchannel.com to find and delve through in people's free time It's been a lot, an exercise in humility if you read any of this stuff Because what I really tried to do, I mean, thanks to some of my colleagues, we managed to get like 120 documents You know, from the very beginning of my career in the 80s through into the Obama administration declassified Because there's always a temptation when you write something that's largely a memoir to write what you wish you had said or you wish you had recommended And I'm as guilty of that as the next person, but what I was trying to do is anchor this and what I actually said And as I said that some of it is, you know, you can see very clearly things I got wrong too So anyway, thanks for the pitch We'll talk about that too Well, so let's delve into the book One of the most eye-opening parts of your book is the stories you tell about meetings with some of the most infamous, famous, both leaders of the last few decades You open up a chapter with a meeting with Libby and dictator Qaddafi in the desert Take us inside that meeting, what was it like, and what was it like spending time with him? Yeah, well, I mean, I always thought as both a diplomat and an author that if you can't get color out of more moral Qaddafi, you know, you need to find another profession I mean, he's by far the most peculiar truly weird foreign leader with whom I ever dealt You know, I never forgot the blood in his hands, you know, whether it was, you know, innocent passengers and a jetliner killed in Lockerbie at the end of the 1980s Or the vindictiveness with which he treated his own people But yeah, that one I described in the meetings that I had with him, this was in a period where we just finished a set of quiet talks Another set of back channel talks with the Libyans, brokered to a large extent by the British to persuade Qaddafi first to accept responsibility for the Lockerbie terrorist incident And to pay, you know, compensation to the families of the victims to get out of the business of terrorism And then ultimately to give up what was a rudimentary nuclear program at the time And, you know, he did this for cold blooded reasons. He was facing a lot of economic and political pressure The United States and lots of our partners have put together a pretty strong international coalition After 9-11, I think he was worried about being on the wrong side of history And so this created an opportunity to do this So one of the meetings I described in the book was kind of like a scene, if any of you remember the John Candy, Steve Martin movie, planes, trains and automobiles Because you fly in an US government jet to the old wheel-less air force base outside of Tripoli And he was once the biggest US air force base in the world, now controlled by Qaddafi You get there, then you are shepherded across the tarmac to one of his, you know, fleet of presidential jets, I think he had two And, you know, this was vintage 1970s, kind of a lime-green shag carpet with swivel chairs that had long ceased swiveling And then you're taken to Sert, which is his hometown on the Mediterranean, east of Tripoli And then we spent about two hours in Range Rovers driving through scrub desert to his encampment Because he liked to move around a lot, mostly for security reasons So long after midnight we get to this desert encampment, I'm ushered to the front of a tent It's a pretty simple military-style tent inside his Malmoral Qaddafi with white plastic one furniture I mean, you know, I'm embarrassed to have it in the back of my backyard One bulb hanging from the ceiling, a little wooden desk And he's sitting there, it was cold in the desert that late at night, sort of wrapped in a headscarf too So you could really only see his eyes And then we spent, you know, another three hours until 3.30 in the morning talking And it was, as I remember saying afterwards to Colin Powell, who was in the Secretary of State It was the weirdest combination of the kind of eerily insightful and the just plain eerie that I had ever heard I mean, his assessment of, you know, this was right after the war in Iraq and where we were headed was actually pretty sensible His analysis of, you know, the growing erosion of prospects for a two-state solution was pretty thoughtful But then he'd go on these weird tangents I remember somehow he asked what my ancestry was and I said, you know, it was of Irish extraction And then there was this long digression about how the Arabs had discovered Ireland and, you know And he also had this really unsettling habit, at least for me, of he would pause for literally like three or four minutes In the middle of a conversation and stare at the ceiling And I assumed he was like collecting his thoughts But I remember on one of our prior meetings, he was a pretty flashy dresser And so he had on what I could only describe as a pajama top with photos of dead African dictators on it So I would spend the three or four minutes when he would pause trying to figure out how many I knew of the dead African dictators So this is high diplomacy, you know, this is what you... But, you know, as bloody-minded as he was, as weird as he was, as deeply repressive he was at home You know, this was an instance where working with lots of other countries, we were able to produce a result Now Gaddafi never escaped his weird repressiveness, that's what led to revolution and his undoing And eventually his death, but from the narrow point of view of US interests Those back-tunnel conversations accomplished something Now we're all gonna be wondering where to get those pajamas, where to find them, not on Amazon Yeah, don't think so No, probably not So you referenced earlier the fact that over your long career there were things that you wish you would have done differently Or administrations you worked for did differently, I think that's pretty normal as much as I spent less time than you did in government It's probably fair to say that anyone who was in the administration during the Arab Spring looks back And there's things that they wish had gone differently As you look back, how do you assess the Obama administration's handling of the uprisings? I mean, I think all of us, certainly me included, got some things right and some things wrong I mean, in the following sense, I mean, I always thought President Obama, I admired his kind of long game view of the Middle East The sense that, you know, when he became president he was determined not to detach from the Middle East But to change the terms of engagement and make it less focused on the weight of the US military Which remains very important, but focus more on diplomacy to focus on the sort of deeper sources of dysfunction and disorder in the Middle East You know, what produced the Arab Spring and to try to pay attention to the brittleness of, you know, some of the authoritarian regimes in the Sunni Arab world Is whom, you know, we had been, you know, most connected and on whom we relied over the years And, you know, I think also a clear sense on the President's part, you know, which I admired of the limits of American agency in the Middle East Because there's a tendency not just on the part of Americans, so for much of the post-World War II period And especially, you know, after 1967 and the sort of British disengagement from the Middle East There was a tendency on the part of American administrations of both parties, as well as lots of leaders in the region To assume too much about the centrality of America's role So all of those things, you know, were part of that kind of long game view, which I always admired The problem, you know, in diplomacy as I've found over the years is, you know, the short game intercedes And so I remember there was a British Prime Minister named Harold McMillan More than a half century ago, who has once asked, you know, what really shaped success for a statesman And he said, events, your boy, events And, you know, there's a lot of truth in that, because no matter how compelling your long game, your strategy, your vision You know, it's how you manage events and stuff that happens at a pace that's hard to understand sometimes when you're outside government And that was what happened with the Arab Spring, you know, the revolution in Tunisia, then Egypt and Libya And all of them on the surface appearing quite similar, but these are much different societies And so they unfolded in different ways, and our stake in those societies varied as well So if you look at the sort of three principal cases, at least, that I try to address as honestly as I put in the book Egypt, Libya and Syria On Egypt, I think, and you know, I mean, people can disagree with me on this, we got more right than wrong You know, the Gulf Arab critique that we threw Hussein Mubarak under the bus, I always thought missed the point The bus, in a sense, was halfway across his prone political body Before President Obama pronounced himself on, you know, on Egypt's future We got, we got tactical things wrong You know, it would have been better, Americans oftentimes get caught up in the notion that elections are the market democracy And you know, elections move very quickly in Egypt after the revolution And you know, in a sense benefited what was left of the old National Party of the Mubarak regime as well as the Muslim Brother Because they were the best organized parties, and it was very hard for progressive forces You know, many of the young people were in Tahrir Square during the revolution to organize themselves You know, we also got, I mean, I to this day feel guilty when I think of you as the spokesman for the State Department As we merrily sent up talking points about how the coup that President Sisi undertook wasn't a coup And you know, I mean, we should have just been straighter about it and said it's, the reason we were hesitating was because under U.S. law If we declared it a coup, all U.S. assistance would stop And so we wanted to avoid that, but in hindsight, there's something to be said for honesty And we should have just done that, and then argued with the Congress about why it wasn't a good idea to cut off all assistance In Libya, I think it's hard as you look back to have avoided some kind of military intervention Having dealt with Qaddafi over the years, I was convinced of two things Some kind of humanitarian catastrophe was coming in Benghazi I mean, he was dead serious about what he said about stamping out rebellion there And second, I don't think there was a chance he was going to negotiate his way out of this He was going to negotiate a transition You know, he was going to get carried out of power on a board that was in And then you have to remember at the time, you know, we had the Arab League, which hardly ever unites on anything Calling on the United States and UN Security Council to intervene militarily Qaddafi was the one Arab leader who could unite everybody around the Arab League table Mostly because at one time or another he had tried to off most of the other Arab leaders And you had Arab states volunteering to participate militarily or closest to European allies Especially Sarkozy and Cameron who were championing at the bid to act We got a UN Security Council resolution which the Russians had stained on to allow it to go through So in a way the stars were in alignment What we got wrong, however, obviously is our assumptions about how hard it would be to build security on the day after Our assumptions about the capacity, to be honest with you, of some of our European allies About we underestimated the tendency of some of our Arab partners to immediately revert to form and take sides in the Libyan Civil War And then of course came the terrible tragedy in Benghazi and that, you know, was a huge inhibition on the United States Engaging more actively than we did, notwithstanding the quite courageous efforts of lots of American diplomats on the ground Even after Benghazi So those are the assumptions I think we got wrong in Syria It's hard to conclude anything other than that that was a policy failure for the United States for all of us Given the horrific humanitarian consequences and the spillover Syria was a classic example of the opposite of the old Vegas rule What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happened in Syria didn't stay in Syria It spilled over, affected European politics through migration It affected the politics and stability of lots of countries and the area I think on Syria, this would be my last comment That we got ends and means wrong You know, we tended to slip too quickly into pretty maximalist ends You know, Assad has to go and the problem is if you're the United States and you say that the assumption is you're going to deliver it But at the same time, ironically, I think we were too reluctant on means You know, in the sense that we did a lot to support the Syrian opposition But it tended to be quite grudging and incremental Were you contrast that with what Putin did in September of 2015 Which was relatively modest in terms of the military scale But it was decisive and telescoped and it, you know, had a bigger political bang So, yeah, I think of what we got wrong obviously and some things that we got right Well, before we get to audience questions, so get your questions ready I could keep asking you questions for hours, but that doesn't allow for in the schedule I wanted to ask you that your book is the first real public account of the secret talks that eventually produced the Iran nuclear deal And people should certainly read the book for all the details I won't ask you to recount every moment But most people have not met with the Iranians So what was that like? I mean, what did you drink? What did you eat? What was the first meeting like? Well, I remember the first time this is before the secret talks started At the end of the George W. Bush administration, summer of 2008 We finally agreed to join our international partners at the nuclear talks Because for reasons that I always thought were wrong, we had resisted that for a number of years And I remember then, you know, going into the room with my partners from the permanent members of the UN Security Council Plus Germany for an interminable four-hour meeting And I remember the head of the Iranian delegation was a gentleman named Jalili Who just could go When he didn't want to give a straight answer, he could substitute hours and hours of rhetoric and verbiage to do that At one point, remember he mentioned kind of on the side that he continued to teach a course at Tehran University I said to one of my colleagues, don't envy his students in this But I remember sending an email back to Secretary Khande Rice right after this After the five and a half hours of discussion saying we probably hadn't missed all that much over the years Because it was, you know, in that setting at that time, it was pretty unedifying And we were just in our wheels So then you fast forward to the secret talks, which President Obama began in earnest early in, very beginning in March 2013 At a moment when, you know, we had spent President Obama's first term building a fair amount of pressure on the Iranian regime Its oil exports had dropped by 50%, the value of its currency had dropped by 50% But it wasn't sanctions for the sake of sanctions, it was for a reason to set the stage for a serious negotiation And so, you know, you have to remember as many of my former colleagues here know very well You know, we had gone 35 years without sustained diplomatic contact with Iranians We and they were a little out of practice And there was huge baggage on both sides I mean, U.S.-Iranian relations were a minefield and nobody had a good map for getting through it But I was convinced then and remain convinced now that there's no substitute for directly engaging one another So, you know, those first meetings, they took place, the Omanis orchestrated this They were reliable facilitators Oman was a little bit off the beaten path So we met in a military officer's guest house, which they had cleared of military officers for the occasion Right on the Arabian Sea, which was about 120 Fahrenheit, I think, outside So there wasn't much to do other than talk to one another And, you know, the first conversations were a little bit stilted, as you can imagine But, you know, over time, we did nine or ten sessions over the course of most of 2013 Punctuated by the election of a new Iranian president, Rouhani, and a new foreign minister, Javad Zarif And, you know, a group of diplomats who were quite savvy and quite tough And we made a lot faster progress than we expected that we would And, you know, produced at the end of November 2013 by then working with our international partners An interim deal, which, you know, in retrospect, I think was actually a better deal for us than it was for the Iranians We froze their nuclear program, rolled it back, you know, introduced quite intrusive verification and monitoring procedures All in return for very modest sanctions relief, we preserved most of the sanctions leverage for the later comprehensive talks In one of life's great ironies, I would argue today, that's a pretty good model for what the Trump White House could achieve with the North Koreans Kind of an interim deal, but that's a whole other story We may get to that. Well, it's time for questions from all of you Just raise your hand. We'll have a microphone come up. Go ahead A microphone's coming up Hi, Nelson Thank you. Hi, Nelson Cunningham. You know, you don't always read the books you buy at these events But I think this is what I'm actually going to read It's a good way to start, yeah My question is this, and starting where Jen started, looking back on 2016 What do you wish you and we had done differently, knowing what we know now about Russia's efforts to interfere in our election? You know, I think it's President Obama. I was out of government by then, but I didn't envy the, you know, the calculus that President Obama and those around him had to make then Because, you know, I think there was always the concern that if you pushed back too hard and too visibly against what was becoming clear was Russian political interference in our elections It would lead to accusations that you were putting your thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton or something else I think in hindsight it would have been worth taking that risk There were some, as I understand it, you know, in the Republican leadership in the Congress who also tried to slow that train down too Because to do this right, it obviously would have had most impact if it had been a sort of bipartisan effort But yeah, in hindsight, you know, given the extent to which Putin was able to take advantage of chaos in our system and so more chaos You know, I think being even stronger than we were sooner as soon as we realized this would have made sense I've always noticed that when you're outside of government, all of a sudden you become much smarter when you're inside I noticed that over the last three or four years, yeah I think I called on the man in the blue sweater right there, yes, go ahead My name is Michael Yehuda, I'm from GW Much earlier I was from the LSE in London I've had the opportunity to sort of look through your book, not read it as carefully as I need to But it seems to me going through the periods you cover It seems as if, so what we have now is the sort of disintegration of much of the international liberal order Which facilitated the kind of diplomacy that you favor Given, of course, we don't know the future, we don't know whether Trump will be re-elected or not How would you assess the prospects for a rebirth, if you like, of some form of the liberal order that seemed to have benefitted most countries? It's a really good question and I think, you know, I start the book with a scene from, you know, my experience working in the George H.W. Bush Administration Working for Secretary of State Baker and that really was when I saw American power and influence at their peak And it was also the moment when an American shaped international order was probably in its strongest form Anybody elected in 2016, you know, would have had to adapt to a much different landscape You know, we're no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block with the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia Huge global challenges of climate, of the revolution and technology that affected, you know, a lot of the existing institutions of that order Which also had to be adapted to take into account China's growing economic weight just as one example So, you know, it's not as if you could sustain that order indefinitely, it's the natural order of things to have to adapt The argument I try to make in the book is that I still think the United States looked at narrowly and selfishly, I guess, from the point of view of American interest Has a better hand to play today than any of its rivals, not just in terms of military leverage or economic leverage But also what sets us apart from lonelier powers like China or Russia That's our capacity to invest in alliances, to mobilize coalitions of countries to deal with these challenges And as all of you know, diplomacy is the tool, not the only tool, it has to be backed up by leverage of different forms You're never going to get anywhere, but that's the tool you use to take advantage of that asset and to reshape an international order Before it gets reshaped for you by the rise of other powers and other events In that sense, I'm a realist about the challenge, which is a huge one and is going to be addressed by this administration, the next one and the one after that But I'm a relative optimist still about the capacity of the United States to play a pretty significant role in that effort And I'm convinced that diplomacy, at least in its best sense, is a crucial tool for doing that I would add quickly that I do not mean to suggest that the drift in American diplomacy was invented by Donald Trump That's not true, I mean we've been drifting in different ways, I think, since the end of the Cold War We became a little bit complacent after the end of the Cold War, we really were the singular dominant player in the international system And then after 9-11, of course, this huge shock to our system, we invested even more in military intelligence tools, less in diplomacy We understand all the challenges, and some of them are for the State Department as an institution too I mean there are individual diplomats that many of us know who can be incredibly innovative and courageous and entrepreneurial But as an institution, the State Department is rarely accused of being too agile or too full of initiative So, you know, there's a lot that needs to change, but I don't think it's an impossible task to help reshape an order That's desperately in need of adaptation in a way which is going to best promote our interests and our values Here, I don't mean just American ones, but probably shared ones, but the longer we wait, the more that window is likely to shut, I'm afraid I'm looking for some women. All right, go ahead, right there Elizabeth Anderson, student at American University Hi So what is your take on the future of US-North Korean relations? And do you think that at this point in time that final and fully verifiable denuclearization is still a realistic goal? I mean, I think what the Hanoi summit between Kim Jong-un and President Trump made clear is that, you know, there's not a chance in the world in the foreseeable future that this North Korean regime is going to agree to full denuclearization I think it's important to retain that as an aspirational goal, but I think the practical question right now is what can you do in the meantime to reduce the dangers? And so that's why I was suggesting, you know, when we were talking about Iran, and I wasn't kidding that, you know, one reasonable model would be to look at the kind of interim deal that we reached with the Iranians at the end of 2013 Now the situations are not analogous, not least because the Iranians didn't then and don't now have nuclear weapons and North Koreans have dozens and, you know, as we speak they're expanding their capacity to make more. But I think there is an argument for using diplomacy backed up by all sorts of leverage to press in the direction of a step that could freeze important parts of their program, roll back some other parts, again on the model of what we tried to do in that initial step with the Iranians, because otherwise I think if we continue to just engage in triumphalist rhetoric and what has in effect been the diplomacy of, you know, narcissism, not institutions, we're kind of setting ourselves up for more disappointments and so I'm not trying to suggest that personal relationships between leaders aren't important, of course they are, but they have to be coupled with a sort of serious systematic diplomatic effort where you use our resources but also those of lots of other players who hold important cards like China, like South Korea, like Japan, and that's what, you know, and that's sort of the choice I think that faces the U.S. administration at least right now All the way to the back with the brown suit on, you've been holding your hand up for a while Well, thank you very much first of all, very quick questions, Mohammed Adrabi from Georgetown University It's about Egypt, how do you deal with the Muslim brothers and President Morsi? How do you deal with the Muslim brothers? And really people with a strong ideology opposing you in the international arena Thank you very much Yeah, I mean I think, you know, the Muslim brotherhood at least in Egypt when we were talking about that instance before, you know, were elected, formed a government But I think, you know, we're never able to get out of, you know, the habit formed by the brotherhood over many years of not wanting to share power of being deeply suspicious of everybody else and trying to, you know, push a particular agenda Now, I thought it was a huge mistake when, you know, the CC government then, you know, basically ended up killing a thousand or so Muslim brothers and their families in two big squares in Cairo in the summer of 2013 I think that just sows the seeds of bigger problems down the road But I always tried to be pretty clear-eyed about how difficult the brotherhood's agenda was for anything like the sort of at least slow progress toward a more open system in Egypt that, you know, the revolution in 2011 seemed to suggest was possible So there are grounds to be suspicious But I think of the brotherhood, but I just think in that instance after you had had an election, brotherhood formed in a government You know, there was no good alternative to us and others in the world trying to deal with them I don't think we always got our assumptions right in that process, you know, during the period of the Morsi government But, you know, I don't think it was wrong for us to make the effort in that period Hi, Tim Hi, Bill, that was wonderful. Thank you very much. Always a pleasure Tim Worth from the United Nations Foundation You talk about the changing world landscape with the U.S. relationship with China and U.S. relationship with Russia and how dramatically different that is Seems to me that there are two other major themes running around the world One is population growth and stabilization And the other is, of course, the crisis of climate change Could you talk a little bit about how you factor those two elements into the role of a diplomat, into the role of the State Department Which is built normally as, you know, much better than I on kind of a very vertical approach and a very regional approach and so on And these are issues that cut across and are really hard to get a handle on And is the State Department adjusting to those? How does that work, do you think? Well, it's a really good question and nobody invested more than you did in your time in, you know, in government in those issues Because the truth is, you know, better than anyone is, you know, if you have to point to a single existential threat in the world today, I would argue it's climate change The State Department has always wrestled with, you know, how best to organize itself to approach those big overarching issues To be effective, you need to do a combination of relying on the talents of people in regional bureaus in the State Department alongside a sense of how you use, you know, the relationships that flow out of that expertise with other governments To push in the direction of what your highest priorities are, you know, climate being one of them So, even though the Paris Climate Agreement was not a perfect agreement, I've rarely seen perfect on the menu for diplomats It was a significant step forward and I always thought it represented not only diplomacy at its best, but American leadership at its best too Because had it not been for our efforts in those years building on what you and your colleagues had done in prior years You know, we wouldn't have produced that and I think what worries me today is our abdication, not just from that agreement, but from the issue entirely And, you know, it's not as if the problem is remaining static, you know, it's becoming a bigger and bigger challenge and it cries out for not only American leadership but smart American diplomacy Of which a well organized State Department is a large part of that too So, there's no substitute, I guess my short answer is for appreciating those priorities for good leadership because, you know, it's people in the end in any institution who, you know, shape your effectiveness as well And I think that's possible in the State Department, however imperfect an institution, you know, it oftentimes is, but you need a political leadership that's going to make very clear the high priority you attach to the issue I've been very patient here in the middle on the green shirt. I think a microphone is just going to come right over. All right, yeah, he's right there Thank you. Thank you Ambassador Burns. Thank you to Carnegie for hosting. I'm actually going through the book and I'm really enjoying the book One of the things that I hope I could get you to talk about a little bit is the Foreign Service as a profession You do a good job in the book of talking about diplomacy as a tool of statecraft, but also foreign policy as a profession And I think, you know, I think I'm quoting you, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but you say when you arrived in the 80s, it was very pale male and Yale I fit two of those things, I missed out on the Yale part I'm sorry for putting words in your mouth, but I would love for you to speak a little bit about what you think going forward The Foreign Service should look like, particularly recruitment, retention, promotion along these lines And I will say the part that I enjoyed about that was that your wife sitting right beside you as you started your Foreign Service as a sort of beginning Of some of the changes that I think we all have to agree we've seen, but perhaps there's more progress that should be made Yeah, no, no, it's a good question. Yeah, the ever romantic Foreign Service entry class, it was alphabetical seating My wife's name is Lisa Cardi, C-A-R-T-Y, so she sat next to me and she didn't buy the argument that this was faded because of alphabetical seating You raise a really important point, you know, when we came into the Foreign Service in the very early 1980s, I think about 9 out of 10 Foreign Service officers were white Less than a quarter, I think were women at that time. This was only a decade after, you know, women who were married were allowed to be in the Foreign Service It was only about a decade after, you know, officers evaluations at the end of every year had a section where your spouse's skills were commented on So the State Department has come a ways, but it still has a very long way to go and one of the things that worries me most today is that the painfully slow progress that we've made over the last 35 or 40 years has actually been put into reverse now You know, we had made a good deal of progress in terms of gender balance at sort of mid-level and more junior ranks still, and I see Beth Jones in front of me as a wonderful senior Foreign Service officer, but we still had a long ways to go in terms of the senior most positions in the Foreign Service But now you've seen that thrown into reverse, I think, both in terms of gender and ethnic balance, and that's not an abstract problem because I always found overseas we get a lot farther through the power of our example than we do through the power of our preaching When we look more like the society we represent, people are going to pay attention to what we have to say about values of inclusiveness or openness or diversity, basically democratic values. When we don't look like that, it's a lot harder to make those arguments And so that worries me today because it takes a lot longer to fix problems like that than it does to break them, and I think that's, you know, with a number of honorable exceptions in the Foreign Service today, I think that's what we're seeing as a pattern that's kind of backsliding now, which will cost us over time And again, not just cost us morally, that's important, but it'll cost us practically as well. At a time when, you know, democratic values are under assault in lots of different parts of the world. I mean, you know, we're having a nervous breakdown on both sides of the Atlantic at the worst possible time, and so paying attention to those sorts of issues is really important to restoring some degree of health to democratic systems Right here, go ahead. Ara Margarion, DCM of Armenia. Thank you, Ambassador, for your very interesting presentation. My question is the following. So, historically after big crisis or war countries, major countries used to come together, discuss what happened and try to shape the world order for the years to come. We have witnessed a couple of that kind of gatherings during 20th century. So the last one that I can recall of that big nature was the Helsinki in 75. But after that, the Cold War ended, and now we are facing major crisis in all around the world, small wars, climate change, as you said. But I don't feel that there is a desire or effort to have some kind of gathering like used to happen and to discuss and to try to diplomatically where we diplomats could actively work and to try to shape the new world order. Do you think there is such a need for that? And if yes, how do you think this could happen? Thank you. I think, to be honest, it would be very hard if the broad frame was looking at how you adapt this international order and make it stronger and take into account the rise of new powers. I think to do one gathering that would do that in this day and age is probably not going to produce a lot. I think what you can do, I mentioned the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 earlier, is you can, I think, build that kind of consensus and sense of purpose around specific overarching issues. If you think of some of the other big challenges before us today, migration is one, as Tim Worth mentioned, revolution and technology is another. How do you begin to create workable international rules of the road to maximize the enormous benefits of the revolution and technology and human health and science, but minimize the pretty obvious downsides, too? There, I'd be skeptical of having one big international conference to address those issues. What I think makes more sense or is at least more practical is to sort of build groups of like-minded countries who share those concerns, who can begin to harmonize some rules of the road, whether it's about, you know, artificial intelligence or other sorts of issues and their military applications or whatever. You know, I think you can begin to build some momentum that way, but you almost have to do it, I think, from the bottom up on those sorts of issues. You know, rather than doing it in one, you know, Versailles conference or Helsinki or something else, those in this day and age, when you have such a fragmented international landscape are pretty hard to pull off. Go ahead, right there, with the black hat on. Hi, Adi Nagasi from University of Georgia. Hi. I'm a student there and I'm actually interning at State. Oh, great. Not bad so far. Great. I had a question. So do you think that the U.S. can foster more transparency and trust in its relations with the Middle East, especially in order to become more productive in Middle Eastern peace talks with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? For example, maybe pulling back our presence in the Middle East, but without compromising our national security? Yeah, I mean, listen, I'll just start with myself. I mean, none of us have a pristine record in American policy in the Middle East over the last 30 or 40 years. We've made, you know, our share of mistakes and flawed assumptions over the years. Part of the problem has been the lack of transparency on some instances. I think, you know, I mentioned earlier, the deep dysfunction in large parts of the Middle East right now, you know, the lack of economic and political opportunity, the lack in a sense of political dignity, which produced the Arab Spring, and as sure as we're sitting here today is going to produce, you know, another version of Arab Springs down the road because what happens if leaderships and societies don't address those issues, they become more brittle over time. I'm not trying to suggest that there's any neat formula. We're talking earlier about the Arab Spring and the mistakes that we made and trying to understand, let alone help manage those processes. But I do think it's important to be honest about those deeper drivers of disorder in the Middle East. That's an important part of a thoughtful American policy. You know, I think on the Arab-Israeli issue, I mean, what you also mentioned, I, you know, there I just think, you know, we'll see what the White House produces in terms of the peace plan that's been much discussed. My fear is that it's based on some flawed assumptions too. I mean, you know, you can't get very far when you're only dealing with one party, which for the better part of the last year I think has been true of, you know, sort of U.S. context with Israelis and Palestinians. There really hasn't been much with Palestinians. Second, I think it's a flawed assumption to think that you can in a sense substitute for Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. Arab-state context with Israel. That's really important. Israel's normalization in a sense in the Middle East, its acceptance by Arab states is extraordinarily important. It's a good thing in many respects that they share a concern about Iran and, you know, its threatening actions. But it's not in my view a substitute for Palestinians and Israelis dealing with one another. Nor can you substitute economic incentives for political dignity in dealing with Palestinian aspirations or Israeli aspirations as well. And there seems to be a little bit of that and what I read of the peace plan. And last flawed assumption, I think, is the sense that time is on our side. You know, no great sense of urgency. And I just think if you look at the reality, looking at it purely in terms of Israel's interest as a Jewish democratic state, you know, you know, sometime in the next 5-10 years, Arabs are going to be in a majority in the area that Israel, the land that Israel controls from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. Now, how do you sustain a democratic, you know, system in that kind of a case unless you have a truly, you know, national one state solution, which also has its own complications. So that's another area where, you know, we just have to be realistic, I think, and honest about some of the challenges out there, too. And I do think the last point I'd make, you know, talked a little bit about disengaging from the Middle East. I think President Obama had it right, in my view, in terms of his long-gain perspective on the Middle East, especially after the, you know, disastrous consequences of the war in Iraq in 2003. It wasn't so much disengaging from the Middle East. It was changing the terms of engagement. So less militarized, less reliance on U.S. military presence, and more on diplomacy, on development, on addressing some of those deeper drivers of disorder, still makes for an enormously complicated problem, an enormously complicated region. And my nostalgia for dealing with the Middle East as a U.S. government official is certainly under control. So we have time only for one more question. Just two reminders. One, the bookseller will be downstairs. Members of our team can help direct you there. Ambassador Burns will also be down there signing books. Second, please do sign up for our podcast. There's little handy dandy sheets if you want to know where to go that you can take home, put in your pocket. Very easy. So last question. Who do we have for the last question? I'm going to go with you here, ma'am. Thank you. Veronica Cartier, I'm going to think thank community. You have mentioned some of the most important things we have to do as, you know, as your background as a diplomat and based on your book. But my question is, with our current situations, when Mueller's report is still on the process for the public knowledge, what do you think is the most important thing we have to do and focus to secure our allies? Because our allies is very depend on the United States stability and moving forward, especially, you have mentioned that Israel, Palestinian, and Russia also, but how about in the Asia and Indo-Pacific region, which is now is very sensitive for our maritime operation there? Thank you. It is. No, it's a really good question. And as I suggested before, I think what sets the United States apart in a sense as a major power in the world today is not only our military and economic power, which is considerable, it's our capacity for drawing on alliances and mobilizing coalitions of countries. And I worry that over the last couple of years in this administration, there's clearly a tendency to disparage, you know, the value of alliances, to almost see the international order imperfect as it's been that we did so much to help shape as a constraint on American policy, rather than as a way to multiply our influence in the world. You know, it's a sense of enlightened self-interest that animated American foreign policy, American diplomacy at its best over the last 70 years. We weren't always at our best. And what I fear is that the kind of muscular unilateralism you see today, which tends to be a bit disdainful sometimes of the importance of alliances, or to see them more in the case of NATO allies as a kind of protection racket where, you know, we rent out the U.S. military. I think that mistakes what is one of the greatest sources of our strength, and it's certainly true across Asia and the Indo-Pacific today. The rise of China is the single most consequential development on the landscape before us. I think it's a mistake to think in terms of containing China. What I think we can do working with our allies and partners is to shape the environment into which China rises. Because there's a web of allies, partners across the Indo-Pacific who want to be sure that China's rise doesn't come at the expense of their prosperity or security. That's the challenge for diplomacy is to think of ways in which you can harness that concern. Again, not so much to contain China, but to shape that environment. That would have been the value I would argue of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the big trade agreement which would knit together 40% of the global economy. It creates a set of high-end standards in trade and investment that inevitably shapes Chinese choices over time, their incentives and disincentives. Is it a perfect trade agreement? No. But, you know, I've always found it's much better to take a good agreement and then build on it than to toss it out the window. Because that actually weakens our hand in dealing with some of those challenges and it causes not only adversaries to take advantage, but it causes allies to hedge and to lose faith in us too. And that's another of those trends out there today which I think is very worrisome. Well, Ambassador Burns, thank you for your service. Your time with us today and for writing a great book. Thank you all.