I'm very happy this evening to introduce to you our speaker, John Katska, who will be talking to us about the State of the State Department and Diplomacy, another very timely topic. John Katska is a retired diplomat. He was a senior U.S. Foreign Service Officer with a rank of counselor. He is a Wisconsin native, a UWM graduate, and completed graduate work at George Washington and American universities in Sino-Soviet policies. Politics. John joined the Foreign Service in 1970 and his Foreign Service and Federal career covered 38 years. His main area of responsibility was public affairs. He held overseas postings in Bangkok, Thailand, Moscow, Zambia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and various Washington assignments. After retiring, he was asked to be a special envoy, first to Kosovo after the shooting stopped, then to Belgrade to help re-establish relations, then to Macedonia after their civil war, and finally to Paris for more mundane matters. John is a regular on World Affairs Roundup, a monthly part of UWM's TV series, International Focus, that airs on Sundays on Channel 36 at 4.30 p.m. I just happened to catch it last week. He conducts two programs at the Cedarburg Library, Hot Spot of the Quarter and Great Decisions. He is the coordinator of the Milwaukee Chapter of the World Future Society. Please welcome John Katska. I bring you greetings from your friends in Cedarburg. I assume everyone has friends in Cedarburg. I'm also on the board of festivals of Cedarburg, and so you just missed Oktoberfest, and so you'll have to wait to Winterfest in February now. We're going to start off looking at the mechanics of the State Department before we get into how the department fits into the current turbulent global situation. Some of what we look at tonight is historical, some personal experiences, some current events, and some looking ahead. How many of you have had to look at a diagram like that, a chart like that, flowchart as we call it? There has been very little that has changed in terms of that flowchart since World War II. The principal stress point is between the group on the left, which are the geographical areas, and the functional areas on the right. And to give you a sense of how those tussles over turf and resources go on, each geographical area has a host, that means about six or seven, deputy assistant secretaries that correspond to the functional areas. And the functional areas have the same number of deputy assistant secretaries to deal with the geographical areas. We spend a good deal of our amount of our time keeping an eye on each other. Congress from time to time adds functions. They haven't figured out yet how to add geographical areas. Human rights and democracy promotion are part of Congress's relatively new mandates coming into prominence in the Carter administration. However, a moralistic approach better describes American foreign policy going back to the colonial days. It comes out of our belief in a concept called American exceptionalism. Have you heard that term before? I'll say a little bit more about that later. President Obama added a host of issue regional, even country specific czars and envoys, and President Trump called for their quick liquidation. But he has added a few of his own, and the one I'll bring up is Ukraine, where our ambassador to Ukraine was just recently recalled. But President Trump had a special envoy who recently resigned. How they worked this out was probably, they had some meeting of the mind, but basically these special envoys report back directly to the president, where the ambassador reports through the State Department to the president. Presidents like these special envoys, because generally they report back to them. FDR used a host of sources, largely outside of government, but in the State Department, the War Department as it was called then, the media, even friends to give him what he called the unvarnished lay of the land. When I went out as a special envoy into the Balkans in the early 2000s, I did not report back to the president. I was the other kind of special envoy. What is the Foreign Service? Well, it was created, it actually hasn't been in existence since the beginning of the country, but in 1926, something called the Rogers Act, we brought some order and discipline to the process. Up to that point in time, it was largely an extension of the spoils system, rewarding political friends and families of important donors. The appointment of a number of ambassadors, and it ranges depending upon the president as to how many political ambassadors we have. Some of the finest ambassadors we ever had were political ambassadors. Some of them were so powerful and so connected in their own right that they were the right person for the job. But we've had a lot of miserable political ambassadors. On the other hand, we've had some pretty lame career ambassadors as well. A few words about what it takes to become a Foreign Service officer, an FSO. About 20,000 take the written exam each year. Fewer remain after a personal narrative set of questions and fewer still face an oral board of senior officers. They figured by the oral board, they know you're smart enough to do this, but how will you fit in?  And after medical and security clearances, about 500 are placed on a register according to their grades in the written and oral phases. The number actually brought on board can range from about 100 to 500 depending upon the needs of the service, depending upon how many retire. Actually, with the number of resignations, there's probably a lot of openings. The service is divided into five cones. Cones as not an ice cream cone. Political, economic, public affairs, which was the cone that I was in, consular and administrative. People generally stay within their cone for their entire career. The career path is divided into three phases. The entry level, which is a five-year probationary period. If you make it past that and you don't mess up, you make it to 20 years. And if you get to 20 years and you're a Class 1 officer, which is the equivalent of a full colonel, then you would retire. If you get selected into the Senior Foreign Service, which is the equivalent of generals and admirals, you're on contracts. And so you serve for seven years for your first contract, and if they don't need anymore people at a higher rank, they'll say thank you for your service and goodbye. That's what happened to me. Backing up the Foreign Service are a number of civil service employees, providing support for programs, human resources, budgeting and information systems, along with other support functions, primarily in the State Department. What these numbers do not address is a factor that is affecting, I guess it actually is affecting everyone, outside a government and inside a government. And that's called contractors. In the Foreign Service, we dress up the title and call them special envoys. Congress put specific limits on the size of all U.S. government entities. Contractors were the way of getting around those limits. But the green eye shades looked at this and they said, ah, this is even better than we thought. We don't have to pay benefits or a retirement. And when you don't need the person anymore, you just say goodbye. In the field, and the Foreign Service thinks of the field as being the important place, not the State Department, not Washington. In the field, the management of the operation is the country team. COM is chief of mission, that's generally the ambassador. The DCM is the deputy chief of mission, number two. The rest of those will have titles depending upon the size of the embassy. When I was in Moscow, I was a minister counselor, though my personal rank was counselor. Minister counselor would be equivalent of a two-star general. All of those would have been different. The larger the embassy and the more pleasant the place, almost every agency and department in the government wants to have people there. Because they want to have people there to take care of them, the political appointees and the senior members of each of the departments and agencies when they're visiting. The ambassador is the president's representative. Well, you saw the conflict, both in Obama's time and in now in Trump's time specifically in Ukraine, where you have a special envoy for Ukraine and you have an ambassador. They have to work that out. And there are limits to what ambassador can control, and I've seen several times where ambassadors have overstepped and been sanctioned by Washington for doing so. Ambassador in Yugoslavia made a reference to Macedonia when he traveled down there, and the Greeks took extreme unhappiness with that situation. And he was told never to ever say that again. But ambassadors, a wise ambassador will choose his or her battles carefully. What do we do? Well, most of this is pretty self-explanatory. As we have moved deeper into the information age, our ability to interact with broader parts of a country's society beyond just official government-to-government relationship opens up new opportunities for influencing and explaining policies. FSOs communicate policy. They do not make it. Well, they may adjust it on the edges. One of the more important goals is to communicate U.S. policy. I have to tell you, every year I do this, I get a larger font type. I'm up at 22 now. It's going to be one letter for a page. One of the most important goals is to communicate U.S. policy to the host government and to the broader society and report back on how that policy is received and, if appropriate, advise on what changes would make sense. And sometimes this really does apply when you're dealing with something as dynamic as, say, the Ukrainian-Russian situation. Presidents expect and like the fact that we are promoting their policies. They don't care as much for feedback that it's not being well received. And they really aren't interested in any adjustments that we're making to the policies. Increasingly, the embassies and the Foreign Service are being left out of major policy decisions. This has less to do with President's attitudes towards the Foreign Service and more to do with the Information Age. Beginning, let's go back to Bill Clinton's administration and Yugoslavia. Another special envoy, Holbrook, orchestrated the entire affair. Brought Limolosevic and the Croats and the Bosnians together and got them off to Dayton, Ohio for the talks there. And the embassy was not involved at all. That was the first instance of that in my knowledge and like during my career. Under George W. Bush, the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense drove policy after 9-11. But that isn't come as a surprise. Whenever we go into a warfare kind of situation, the Defense Department takes a much higher role. Under President Obama, in his first term, we had a very interesting dichotomy of directions. At the time, Secretary of Defense Gates and Secretary Clinton, as well as the National Security Advisor, Donilon, were realists. And they were promoting a very pragmatic foreign policy. The second term comes around, Gates is gone, Donilon is gone, because Secretary Clinton does a backflip and joins up with Susan Rice, the National Security Advisor and Samantha Powers at the UN and became a very idealistic and I would even say interventionist mode. It was a policy called R2P, R meaning the responsibility to protect. So we were going around jumping into situations around the world and doing the moral high side of this. I'll get into more of that later. Under Donald Trump, there is no pattern, though he shows little appreciation for contributions from embassies or the State Department. That doesn't come as a surprise to anyone, even supporters would understand that. The information age has fueled this disconnect between embassies and the State Department in Washington and between those in the State Department working in Washington and the White House. Allowing a smaller and smaller group in Washington to access what they think is enough information to make decisions. When the info gallery and the decision making is made inside the Beltway as they call it, in Washington D.C. Pressure Cooker, domestic interest and public opinion polls can be as important or more important than foreign policy considerations. The news media is not outside of this problem as well. They are reacting now as fast as they can. As soon as they get a story, they run it on either onto the television or onto their news sites, and governments then have to react to those news stories well before anyone recognizes whether or not this particular incident is truly as it's being reported. So that's part of the problem as well. I think I've shown you this one last year, but this is a slightly different approach to it. The State Department has been under assault for the last two plus years. President Trump has displayed minimum appreciation of the contribution of the Foreign Service and the misguided leadership of Rex Tillerson added to the disarray. Not that state or the Foreign Service does not need reform, but Tillerson's efforts might have been beneficial if we were talking about a corporation which he came out of. However, bureaucracies, especially those with changing and nuanced goals like those involved in foreign affairs, do not easily correspond to those corporate guidelines. There is a continuing struggle between the realist and idealist within the Foreign Service, currently leaning strongly towards idealists. Realists in the administration, Trump's administration like former National Security Advisor McMasters, have been at odds with the bureaucracy over issues like Ukraine, Russia, and Syria. The net result is that President Trump inherited a foreign affairs blueprint, strongly supporting the promotion of democracy and human rights, especially in the Middle East, with little consideration of the costs and consequences of those positions. Okay, what do I mean when I talk about realist and idealist? Realists look at our national interests, the more practical at dimensions of international relations. Idealists focused on the moral aspect. How do our values affect an issue? Concerns like democracy and human rights often come up. Rarely is anyone totally a realist or an idealist. And one's position can change depending on the circumstances and the issue. Also, and this is important, one position is not better or more right than the other. They are just different and they need to be treated differently. Yes, there are other perspectives that play as well. Hawks and doves come to mind when we're talking, especially about the Middle East, and they can be either idealist or realist, but in case of the Middle East, lately there, the Hawks are more likely to be idealists. No one who comes to mind is the senator from South Carolina, who has come out publicly against the president on the Syria. And he was with McCain. John McCain was a great war hero. I have a great deal of respect for him. Before I went into the Foreign Service, I worked at Defense Intelligence Agency on prisoner of war issues. And I had a chance to know which of those prisoners were heroes and which weren't. He was one of the heroes. But he couldn't, he didn't see a conflict anywhere in the world. He didn't want to get involved in it. And his body in South Carolina is of the similar idea. There's a group called the neocons who kind of pushed us into our adventures in the Middle East. They were New York Democrats who got, who felt that the Democratic Party was too soft on foreign affairs and switched to Ronald Reagan's election and became Republicans. But they are still, they are, they are highly idealistic. They were, they were the ones that pressed when we didn't find the weapons of mass destruction that pressed for going into democracy promotion. Our domestic dividing line, liberals and conservatives often play out as factors in foreign affairs, especially in our very partisan political environment. Generally, this means either endorsing or attacking the policies of the president depending upon whether that person is from their party or not. We can see lots of that going on. The critical factor for all the options, realists and idealists, hawks and doves, liberals and conservatives is costs and consequences. I'll say this several times during the night and I'll end with it. Cost and consequences should always be examined by any point of view as to whether or not it's sustainable, whether or not it's feasible, whether or not we can afford it. Foreign affairs shouldn't be about feeling good. What are state, the state department's issues? Those of us on the inside always refer to it as state, you know, we drop that department stuff. In this turbulent time, it is not surprising that the state department is in disarray. All the factors cited in this slide contribute to not only the state departments, but the U.S. governments, U.S. problems as well. And to that, a president and a former secretary of state Tillerson who are or were antagonistic to or not supportive of the role of the state department and its FSOs. And I keep talking about FSOs because the FSOs are like military officers in the military. They are the driver of this whole process. There are civilians that back this up, civil service people who back it up. It is the foreign service officers who are the drivers for a U.S. foreign policy. To understand the current dynamic, remember that the federal bureaucracy, the media, academia, although they probably wouldn't like to say this, are mostly part of the establishment. The state department FSOs, I was part of the establishment. Donald Trump was elected on an anti-establishment platform. A recipe for confrontation. So when the bureaucracy comes back at, it may be on factual basis, but it also may be ideological. Also in the period following 9-11, the Department of Defense continued to be the important driver in foreign affairs. Not an unusual situation as I mentioned earlier. Resignations, op-eds, and carping have not helped. Foreign service officers are protected from immediate dismissal, but they are presidential appointees and serve in their current positions at the pleasure of the president. That ambassador to Ukraine, who went off and suggested to the host government that someone in the anti-corruption department should be removed, went well beyond her license to do. Unless she got clearance from Washington and there was no way that the state department was going to clear that, she was misspeaking. So she was pulled out of her position. Two observations. Oh, got ahead of myself. Basically when I was working, if I didn't agree with the president or his policies or her policies, we didn't have her yet, but we'll throw it in there. I have three choices.  In the highly partisan environment that we're in now, some of my former colleagues have a hard time keeping their personal views to themselves. I did mention there were three options. We do have what's called a dissent channel, in which an officer can object to a policy. These dissent messages go directly to the secretary of state. Two observations from my nearly 40 years in the business. You better be brilliant in your dissent, or it is going to backfire on you. And secondly, the dissent channel is a private communication from the officer to the secretary of state. It is not to the Washington Post or the New York Times. And that's happened. President Trump inherited a foreign affairs structure, strongly supporting the promotion of democracy and human rights, with little consideration of the cost and consequences of those positions. Nowhere is this more obvious to me than in the Middle East, where we seem to find new value-driven concerns about the leaders and their practices to get politically and militarily involved. Much of the Congress, and probably the Foreign Service Officer Corps, continues to enthusiastically support those goals. This president, not so much. In fact, reflecting on the past administration, I think President Obama was moved into some of those idealistic and intrusive positions in his second term more by his staff than by his own interest. He was much more pragmatic than his staff was. I thought under Secretary Tillerson, he was the first Secretary of State for probably a very short, less than two years, that there was an opportunity to restructure the Foreign Service and state to make it more in touch with the information age. We have embraced many of the tools that connectivity allows. Twitter, god. I think we would be so much better off if every politician, no politician, was allowed to use Twitter. Everything would be... It is a highly emotional tool. It is not a thoughtful tool. And Facebook, et cetera. But we haven't learned how to use them effectively or understand the changing values and influences in the information age. We think if we inundate foreign societies with our point of view that that will convince them of the wisdom of our policies. Often this is done without an appreciation of the host culture and what will work and what will not. Again, the closer we bring all of this decision-making into this smaller group within Washington, because it's easy, they've got lots of information, but they don't have context. Yes, there are those who are looking back nostalgically to the Cold War. I'm not one. To put this in context, in 1993, I just came out of Moscow for my second tour there. The Soviet Union was gone. Russia was there. All kinds of little states were popping up all over the former Soviet Union. And I went to play squash with a former ambassador from Africa, Zambia. And we get in the elevator and in steps Larry Eagleburger, and as I mentioned to you, the first career officer ever to be Secretary of State. When James Baker resigned to go and campaign for Herbert Walker, Eagleburger, who was the number two, was elevated to Secretary of State. And I was introduced and told it, and he said I had just come out of Moscow, and Eagleburger talked like this. You know, we're going to ruin the end of the Cold War. And what he was talking about was a broad U.S. understanding that justified a range of programs under the strategic goal of containing the Soviet Union. Not much later, the foreign affairs community was hit with massive cuts called peace dividend by President Clinton. Again, this would have been an opportunity to do some reforming and remodeling. Well, all we did is salami slice each of the departments and offices all the way down so that everyone took an equal share of this. No attention to where was the higher priority, how were the priorities shifting. Under several recent presidents, our policies in the Middle East have been largely reactive. That's my opinion. We keep confusing our goal to eliminate al-Qaida, ISIS, and other terrorist organizations with a desire to develop democratic institutions in those countries. And I'll give you an example I've used a few times. Put yourself in a small, remote Afghan village. I'm the State Department representative. I come in with my military colleague and we come in there and we say, we need your help to make sure that al-Qaida does not come back in here and that the Taliban is not controlling this area. And then out of the other side of my mouth, I say, but you have to revise the way in which you're doing things. You have to become more democratic. You're going to have to have elections. You're going to have to allow the women in your village to participate in the political dynamic. And that village leader going to Eagle Burgers' pose is saying, you want me to help you and then you want to destroy me? It's the kind of dichotomy that we face, especially in the Middle East. Our dual goals of defeating terrorism and building democracy aren't working. Often because we aren't paying attention to the host country cultural values, which often are at odds with our own values. I said it earlier before we started. Most of the world is not democratic by our definitions, not even close. Most of the world has never been democratic by our definitions. It takes a great deal of work to create a democracy and keep it going. In Russia, the culture is so different, they're not interested in the individual. It's the group that's more important. The family, also in this turbulent time, an increasing number of nation states are consolidating power. And we're calling this the rise of authoritarianism. Well, it's been around for a long time. It's just now it's creeping into the ranks of some of what we used to call democracies. I would suggest that those leaders are grabbing control to give themselves more flexibility in dealing with uneasy domestic situations, but a very unpredictable foreign affairs, especially their own environment. Besides the usual suspects of China and Russia, let's add India, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, and others. We have decisions to make about how we deal with these more authoritarian leaders. Do we look to our interests or to our values? Historically, we have managed to push interest with the strong and values with the weak. It's a comfortable way in which to deal with it. Sometimes we get that crossed, as we're probably doing to a degree with China right now, and it gets a bit muddled. To be a major or sole world superpower, consistency is not the name of the game. There is no way we can have the same kind of policy for India as we have for Sudan. It just works out very differently. So we do, if someone sits down and says, well, you said this regarding that country and that regarding that country, that is just, that's okay. That's how it is. With the rise of regional powers like China and Russia, Russia had gone from a superpower to a regional power, we are finding limits to our ability to counter what we consider practices that are contrary to our values and sometimes to our interests. We react too often without thinking through the cost and consequences. This is the third time. And how long and how much it will cost if we want to support an opposition. For example, in the Ukraine, where internal dynamics and foreign pressure will require a long-term commitment without any guarantee of success or eliminating going to another context to the Middle East or eliminating one bad guy like in Iraq or Syria, will or not result in a better leadership or a more stable country. The international institutions that have been the backbone of international interaction are products of the industrial age when Europe and the US could decide for the world. Nowhere is this more the case than in the Security Council in the UN where only China has been added to the group since World War II. They've come up with another organization called the G20, which enlarges this somewhat. But the issue there is it lacks any structure or authority. I mentioned earlier that American foreign policy is centralizing and I won't even repeat that because that was enough on that. I said that the Defense Department has become more involved and as Trumps fell left, it is not nearly the player it was. The White House is calling the shots. It would call the shots through the last part of the two terms of Obama and now in Trump's. The National Security Advisor, who just left, just resigned, was a key player, but he was not in tune with the president. He didn't ever quite understand how John Bolton never got appointed. John Bolton was a neocon and John Bolton is an interventionist from the word go. And Trump is not really an interventionist in that respect. He is much happier often doing the deals, quote on quote deals. In this administration, it is that particular Twitter account that is used to make more policy than anyone else, a longish wrap-up. In 1997, I was a member of the Washington D.C. World Future Society chapter. An expert at one of our sessions noted that at that time that we were 10 years or so into the information age. And in another decade, it should all work its way out. Well, here it is 2019 and we're still evolving. The information age with its connectivity, incredible amount of data, real and fake. And shrinking the world and changing the nature of foreign affairs. We no longer talk to foreign affairs ministries only, but to a broad spectrum of host country types in a variety of ways. Some traditional, some like Facebook and the like. However, we haven't, I believe, figured out how to do that effectively. And the problem I think is again, the technology is being pushed into the field from Washington. And the messages are coming from Washington. And what we did in the past is we would then go into, see our contacts and we would sit down and we would adjust that. There was earlier on, I said that the FSOs don't make policy, but they can adjust it to make it more understandable to host nationals. And the messages are coming in from Washington and they're going on to social media in these various countries. And it sounds good in Washington, but it doesn't necessarily sound so good in on that non-democratic part of the world that we're trying to influence. As I mentioned earlier, the State Department had to deal with aging industrial age international institutions, created for the most part 70 years ago by the winners of World War II. There is little willingness, especially in the UN Security Council, to change or enlarge the UN Security Council to add, say, a Brazil or a South Africa or an India because of the objections of one of the permanent members. Those permanent members, I mean here we have France and Great Britain as their second tier powers now, and they still have a veto within the Security Council. So it is unlikely that the UN, especially in the circumstances of the Security Council, would be able to bring about any reform. There's something that's going to have to happen. Remember, the League of Nations came out of World War I, the UN came out of World War II, so something dramatic will have to happen to cause the world to look at itself differently and to look more realistically at who are the players in this world. The State Department also needs reforming, but then again so does the whole federal government. And I look back to 1947 when Truman asked Herbert Hoover to head up the Hoover Commission to reform the executive branch. All we have done since then is add agencies and bureaucracies and even departments to the federal workforce. Unfortunately, they did this often reacting as we did after 9-11 when we created Homeland Security and the intelligence are more emotionally than it was in thinking through whether or not this is going to make any sense going forward. As I keep repeating, we're in the information age and it's time we look at what works and what doesn't. Okay, I'm going to dance a little bit around this next topic. Pushback is not pretty. Donald Trump was elected largely, though not totally, by people who were fed up with the existing economic arrangement. And all we have to do is cross the channel, cross the pond and look at what's going on with Brexit to see that we're not unique in this respect. Often called the liberal economic order, it is the engine that brought great prosperity to many in the world, especially in the developed world. Now some say it appears to be running out of steam. Increasing numbers of people around the world are pushing back against the established order, often because they feel they've been left out of the benefits. I'm not here to argue the efficacy of tweets versus quiet diplomacy. It is what it is. However, social media are a growing tool in the U.S. and a great number of other countries. Crowds and mobs can be mobilized. Look at what's happening in Hong Kong. By social media, governments can push their agenda internationally by the same means or interfere in the elections of other countries. However, in foreign affairs, that can be a... Oh, I missed one. As many people noted, Donald Trump is unpredictable. However, in foreign affairs, that can be a positive, allowing the U.S. a more flexibility in a troubled time and causing friend and foe alike to proceed with caution. That's the best case I can make on that one. Now, a historical note. Let me show you a possible parallel to what we're going through now. In 1928, Andrew Jackson was elected President of the United States. What's a hundred years among friends? I don't have... In 1828, I got 24 points out and typed next time. In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected President of the United States. Guess what? He was an anti-establishment candidate. He defeated John Quincy Adams, who was the Eastern Seaboard Establishment Candidate. From 1828 to 1860s, we were moving from the agricultural into the industrial age. During that period, John Quincy Adams' party, the Whigs, disappeared. The Republicans in 1854, in of all places, Ripon, Wisconsin, came into being. The Republicans gained the power and the Democrats were transformed largely into a Southern Party. The point I'm making is that when we go through such epical change, there are new winners and losers. There are assaults on values on institutions.  Francis Fukuyama, who unfortunately picked a very awkward title for his book, The End of History, and what he meant was the end of ideological history, came up with another thing called identity politics. And I think we're seeing it in droves now, especially in Britain with Brexit. Their situation is even more, no matter what happens in Brexit, they are still going to have 51, 49, 51 after whatever happens. There is such a division within the country. I don't know where that goes, but that's, and I'm thankful we're only at 30 to 35% on each side that are diametrically opposed. The trouble is that the rest of them are lean much more towards one side or the other than they do towards the middle. We don't have very many in the middle anymore. Can you see the parallels to what we are experiencing today? Can you see why our institutions are in a bit of disarray and our politics are so partisan? Then there's the issue of foreign policy strategy. I talked a little bit about this. The Cold War ended and what did we have? Well, the first thing that came up was we're going to, the war on terror. Well, how do you know when you win? How do you know who you're fighting? That was in strategy. That was tactics. When we couldn't find the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we came up with a new approach. We were going to create in Iraq a Mecca, that's an appropriate term for that part of the world, that would attract others in the region to try to emulate what we were doing with the Iraqis in building a democracy and a market economy. Well, it sounded awful good back here. It doesn't connect at all out there. Whatever what may provide some relief from this absence of a strategy is the rising concern about, especially China, but also Russia, and might evolve into a strategy that probably will find a number of willing international partners, as well as some bipartisan congressional support. Such a strategy will not be risk-free and without complications, but it will provide more substance and better predictability than what we have been calling Foreign Affairs Strategy since 1992. I noted the role of realists and idealists and hawks and doves in foreign affairs. And if I can leave you with one thing tonight, regardless of your position, please factor costs and consequences into any discussion about a foreign policy issue. When someone says it is our duty or moral responsibility to do this or that, ask them whether they have thought about the costs and consequences. When someone says it is in our national interest to do something, the same costs and consequences apply. This goes for both sides of the house. I have a perspective on foreign affairs and you've heard a lot about it, but there are many other views out there and some of them to many may disagree with me. Gather as many of these points of view as possible before you make up your mind about any particular issue. Thank you. Yes, I'd love that. If you have a question, we ask that you use the microphone because we are being televised and they need to have your voices first one there. John, thank you very much for a wonderful presentation. Your costs and consequences is very, very well taken. My question to you is where do we get the information to determine costs and to determine consequences? One of the casualties of becoming so partisan is that the media on both sides is suspect. I refer to it as advocacy journalism. It doesn't mean that what they're writing or saying on television isn't true, but it's the selection of the information and much of the time it's for a particular political. The best I can find, and even though I suspect it, it leans a little bit to the left of center, is the PBS News Hour. They make an effort at trying to get the different points of view. The network knows, well, first of all, those are readers. They're not journalists. The second point is I think they have an agenda. And the agenda is they're part of the establishment and Donald Trump is going after them. And they've taken their gloves off too. So, read as broadly as you can and actually try to reserve judgment as long as you can. Thank you. In your years as a diplomat, your worst mistake that you regret, was there personal consequences? In a follow-up you answered some of my question. You could say that our State Department is in disarray, but who would you equal to, whether it's a Republican or Democrat in the past, that it's equal to or even worse? Thank you. I was in North East. Yes, I will. Actually, I spent time in three different places in Thailand. I was in Bangkok to start off and then I went up to the Northeast where we had 50,000 American troops. And my job was to run around the bases and as we were losing the war in Vietnam to make sure we weren't losing our relationship with the Thais because if any of you have been in the military you know that the people in base towns even here in the United States do not have wonderful feelings about the people that are out at the base. They would rather they send the checks in without coming. So I worked with the communities to try and mitigate some of the cultural issues. The Thais are very soft spoken. They're not loud or boisterous. They can have six minor wives, four concubines. As long as it's kept quiet, that's just fine and dandy. The women run the house. The guys they say the man is like a dog.  But GIs are loud, noisy, young and full of themselves. And they would grab the girls on the street. They were loud on the street doing all the things that. So you constantly just trying to put out little fires. But that wasn't the issue. I was up and then I went up to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. And this was the big issue up there was the drug smuggling thing. And there weren't only one issue, but it was one of the things that I was still a young officer. And I was learning the ropes and I was pretty much alone in a consulate up there. And I made some mistakes that I didn't have to report back down to Bangkok. That like going in and talking to a newspaper man and having lunch with a newspaper man where I probably had too many sing-ha beers and got a little bit loquacious. And nothing came out of it, but something could have. The second part. The past administration, whether it be Democratic or Republican, you answered something. Yeah, it's been a growing phenomenon. Going back, I put Bill Clinton's administration is when it started. Where the White House took on increasingly larger role in terms of the prosecution and foreign policy. And Bill Clinton lived by the polls. And so at any time a poll came out that had something to do with foreign affairs that wasn't what he was doing at the time. Well, there was a shift. But it's grown. And right now it's really at a fever pace. Thank you. Sure. I like just what you just finished talking about. I'd like to have you go over your comments about Samantha Powers, Susan Rice, and Hillary. Did you think that Obama trusted them too much? Or he let them run the foreign policy? Or you seem to give, I got that impression. My sense is that Obama liked to deal with issues and remove himself from the actual issue and kind of study it. And he's not an activist. He was not an activist president. He was more of a student of the process. And I think it was the sheer will of having these three people presenting these positions to him. But also it also played well in certain areas. Human rights and democracy is a driver. I mean there's a lot of support for it. I'm in favor of democracy and human rights. I just want to make sure that when we do these things we're also being aware of the costs and consequences of them. And whether it's going to be successful or not, or you're just trying to feel good. There's a lot of things going on in the world. Where should we be looking at what has the potential to be the most disruptive? You talked about we need to change. It was the League of Nations. It was the United Nations. We have potential economic war with China. We have disruption in energy supplies in the Middle East. We've got a potential stateless anonymous cyber attack that could bring the world to its knees. Some of these attacks in cyber, all of our water. As well as climate change. So what is the thing that we should be watching or trying to fix? Or in your opinion, where's the biggest danger right now to change the world as we know it? We're not going to change the UN at this particular point because more forces are moving away from it than towards it. When we talked about the rise of authoritarianism I said that these countries leaders were trying to make sure that their home front is stable. And that their environs are stable. India, China. Brazil to a degree is becoming more active. Although if there's a politician who hasn't been indicted, I'm not sure he has been elected yet. But Brazil has problems. But that Mexico is moving in the authoritarian direction. That doesn't bode well for any early reform or new ideas in terms of world governance. I think what we're doing is we're going to be moving into shifting alliances. And it would be good if we did these privately, not in Twitter, blast black and forth between us and Turkey, for example. I'll give you my take on what's going on in Turkey. I think it's a shame that the Kurds are being left high and dry again. But I think there is something to be said for what we did with them to this point. We equipped them. We armed them. We also provided them training. And these are big boys. They've been around us for a long time. And they're not without their problems and faults as well in this process. They are an enemy of Turkey. And they have fought Turkey. The problem with the Kurds is that there's not one unit of Kurds. There are many. There's the Iranian Kurds. There's the Iraqi Kurds. And there's thick different factions within the Iraqi Kurds. And then there's the Syrian Kurds. None of them work well together. They're very fiercely independent of each other. So my feeling is it is going to be painful to get out of the Middle East. It was painful to get out of Vietnam. He is being done partly for a personal gain. There's a talk that Trump made the deal he made in order to protect his personal hotel in Turkey. No, not that one. Trump does not have a normal definition of what is appropriate behavior. It's true. Very true. But I think that one's outside. John, you can have the best State Department and everything is greased and running well. And no one listens. But one individual can change the course of history. Whether it be a assassination, I think World War I. One, yes. And now in the informational age, starting thinking with back to Daniel Ellsberg, Snowden. And they don't like us playing basketball in China right now. Cain, you even guard against one individual. And are they patriots? Are they idealists? Depends on your point of view. Yes, I think Snowden did serious damage to our intelligence capability worldwide. The information that was revealed was so precise that we're going to take a long time. It is not dissimilar to the release of the transcript of the telephone conversation between the president and the president of Ukraine. Once you do that. And I read that transcript. It's not a transcript. It's a summary. You should know that it is not a word-for-word transcript. And there's apparently 10, 20 minutes missing with that conversation. No, I didn't know that. Well, but the point is, revealing that information is devastating to the contacts between heads of state. Who can you trust to keep your mouth shut? How can I say anything to you that is meaningful when you're going to set it out on a Twitter account the next day? Or how can I, how can I, assets within countries? There are people who died because of those, the intelligence that came out. John, getting to your point about making new contacts. Do you feel that possibly Trump can be trying to make different contacts and allow other countries to make contacts by stepping away? I mean, is he pulling out of Turkey or out of Syria? Let's see who else steps up.  We're not funding you anymore. You have to start taking care of yourself. I know that has caused different, not caused, but has created different contacts between Israel and the Arab world. Where before none existed. Now it's the enemy of my enemy is now my friend. So do you feel- Saudi Arabia is working with Israel? Absolutely. And do you feel that this could be an idea that Trump has that say, let's pull back. Let's see what connections are made here. Let's change the dynamics here. We can't do it, but they have the potential to do it. An honest answer. No, I don't think he's thinking that way. That's fine. I think he is reactive. I think he's reactive. What comes up on his, what ever comes up, that's what he reacts to. I'm not saying that what he says as a result of reacting is always wrong or always right. But that's how I see him dealing with foreign affairs. Mr. Keska, 100 questions, but I'll just do two. Hold the microphone here. Okay. Can you hear me okay? Let's see. I believe it was in the 80s, correct me if I'm wrong, that President Ronald Reagan signed on to an international treaty against torture. And if you read the, whatever it is, 86 pages or so of the treaty, you'll see that torture cannot be redefined. You can't say extreme questioning. It's torture is torture. It lays it out very clearly. So we have under George Brush's administration senior people in the administration who were involved in okaying torture. You're talking about W. Yeah, the second one. Okay. Oh, I feel like I'm blasting the world here. Soft spoken. I noticed that they haven't been traveling internationally. If the country itself will not prosecute torturers, the international treaty states that other countries have to do it. And they haven't been going anywhere. I'm wondering if that you think that that is connected or they just haven't been in a mood to travel internationally. That's number one. And number two is a question of how do our, we'll call them intelligence agencies, C.I. and such, integrate within the embassy internationally. Does everybody know who everybody is? Are they doing their clandestine thing while you're doing your public thing? Or is it more integrated? You go to the same parties, kids swim in the same pool. How does that work? Okay. To the first question, they aren't traveling because they don't want to be arrested. Yes. Because there are countries who might want to embarrass us and have a trial. I don't know. I'm just talking to the scenario itself. The CIA has a, I'll stay close to this thing. The CIA has an interesting role within the embassy. In the country team, when the heads of departments, the people in that country team are there, they will talk about things that are going on, things that they're learning. When anyone outside of that group is there or someone's replacing the principal, they will not. In some places, I had a reading room where I would go into, in the CIA area, to read some of the reports that were coming in that were going on. You've got to know context. What's going on? Where might we be having a problem? And I went into Zambia. My predecessor and the political officer were declared persona non grata. They didn't do anything. The two people who did do things were from the CIA. They were running an agent in Zambia. And the agent got caught and they left the country and they were called PI. They were PI'd, which is prohibited immigrant, which is worse than PNG. In some ways, being PNG in your foreign service career is kind of like a purple heart. Especially if it was in Moscow. We talked. They were very careful. They have their own communications separate from the embassy's communications back to Washington. And that's because they're dealing with assets. CIA employees in that context are not spies. They're agent handlers. They are trying to find people who will provide them with information. And the problem we've had over time, there's a lot of downtime between what they're doing when they're doing that. So they began to do the work of the political department. And there was bruised relations between the two. Sorry, watch too much CNN. There you go. If somebody is an ambassador to Belgium, is it a requirement that they speak? No. No. So English, but would it be helpful? Well, my most effective ambassador I had in Moscow didn't speak a word of Russian. It was Robert Strauss who was Mr. Democrat. And this was under a Republican president. And he was there because of his political skills. And after the coup, they had a, and the coup failed, the first attempt to coup. And this was in 92, 91. They had a celebration of the lives of the three young people who were killed in the coup. Strauss had just arrived in country. He hadn't even presented his credentials. Therefore, he was not the ambassador of the United States to Russia. He wasn't there with his interpreter. And he asked, where are Gorbachev and Yeltsin? Gorbachev was still in the picture yet. Gorbachev and Yeltsin going to be sitting. And they said over there, but the ambassadors over there, Strauss went over to where, and sat right behind Yeltsin and Gorbachev. And got time, face time with them at that event. A career ambassador would never have done that. And shouldn't have done it. He had, he knew how to deal with political events without having the language. He had his interpreter right there at his side. So as I said earlier, some of our greatest ambassadors were political ambassadors. And some of our worst were political ambassadors. Thank you. Well, what an audience. Thank you very much.