Thank you for coming. I'm John Ciorciari. I'm an associate professor of public policy and director of the Weiser Diplomacy Center and International Policy Center here at the Ford School. I'm delighted to welcome you this afternoon to our annual Vandenberg Lecture, which this year features Ambassador William Byrne Statesman, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and author of the just-released book that many of you have in your hands, The Back Channel. In conversation with my colleague Michael Barr, the Joan and Sanford Wildein here at the Ford School, I'll say more about Ambassador Byrne's in just a moment, but let me first tell you a bit about why this distinguished lecture series is named for the great Arthur Vandenberg, who served in the state of Michigan and the US Senate from 1928 to 1951. Born and raised in Grand Rapids, Senator Vandenberg led the Republican Party from a position of staunch isolationism prior to US involvement in the Second World War to a broad embrace of internationalism. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he worked to forge bipartisan support for our country's most significant and enduring international policies, including the creation of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the creation of the United Nations. The Vandenberg Fund was established here by the generosity of the Meyer Family Foundation. The Vandenberg Fund enables the Ford School to host an annual high-profile public event on a wide variety of topics related to international relations, US foreign policy, diplomacy, trade, and more. This lecture series is a vital intellectual tribute to Senator Arthur Vandenberg. We're honored that Hank Meyer is here with us this afternoon, and I hope you'll all join me in thanking Hank and the Meyer Family for their generous support for this lecture series. I'd also like to acknowledge three additional special guests with us this afternoon in the audience, all with careers that overlapped with our distinguished speaker's service. First, we're honored to be joined by U of M Regent Ron Weiser, who served as US Ambassador to Slovakia and whose philanthropy and leadership have strengthened the university in so many ways, very much including right here at the Ford School. Welcome, Regent Weiser. The Ford School's own Professor of International Practice, Ambassador Melvin Lubitsky, helped make today's event possible thanks Mel. And finally, we have a special guest on campus, Michigan alumna, Jill Doherty, a former CNN correspondent. Ms. Doherty was the CNN Moscow Bureau Chief while Bill Burns served as Ambassador to Russia, and so we're glad that they can reunite here at the Ford School this afternoon. You'll also see flyers outside for an address that Jill is giving tomorrow here on the UM campus. And now to the star of our show. You will find Ambassador Burns's distinguished biography in the program. As you'll see, he's a luminary of American diplomacy, one of the most impactful diplomats of his era. I'll just mention a few highlights. He served as Deputy Secretary of State from 2011 to 2014, as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2008 to 2011, Ambassador to Russia from 2005 to eight, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs from 2001 to 2005. Before that is Ambassador to Jordan, Executive Secretary, and a whole host of other important roles. Basically, a timeline of his career is a map that illuminates many of the most important issues in U.S. foreign policy in recent decades, from the Arab-Israeli dispute to U.S.-Russia relations to the Iran nuclear deal. Now head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ambassador Burns embodies the values behind the Vandenberg Lecture, as well as those we hope to impart to Ford and UM students at our new Wiser Diplomacy Center. Now just a word on format. We'll have some time toward the end after Dean Barr and Ambassador Burns have a conversation to take some questions from the audience, two Ford School students, Tanya O'Molo and Ashton Smith, and I will sift through your question cards and pose them to the panel. For those watching online, please feel free to tweet your questions using the hashtag policy talks. Again, welcome to Ambassador Burns and now let me hand things over to Dean Barr and Ambassador Burns. Thank you. Thank you very much, John. Thank you, Ambassador Burns, for being here. Thanks to all of you for coming and to very much, let me add my thanks to Johns to our special guests for being here. It's really wonderful to have you and I'm really excited to be here talking about this book, The Back Channel, by Ambassador Burns, which is really just a lovely book, a beautifully written, it is a hard thing to write an honest story about a complicated set of topics and to really, as we'll say, talk about it a little bit down the road and to be nuanced about one's own decisions, to have reflection about one's own choices. It's a super challenging thing to do. What I thought we might do, Ambassador, is start by helping us understand what diplomacy is. It's kind of one of those words that for many people is elusive. So maybe you could start by saying what you think most people think diplomacy is that they're wrong about and then maybe what it really is. Yeah, well thanks, Michael. It's really nice to be with all of you today. A pleasure to be in Ann Arbor. I mean, maybe I'll start by saying, you know, it's most basic definition. Diplomacy is what we use as Americans in this case to promote our interests and values abroad, to try to persuade other governments to act in ways which are consistent with ours or to try to deter them for acting in ways that are gonna run across what we see to be our interests and values. You know, I think it's actually more important than ever today, simply because we're no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block today with the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia and with the emergence of all sorts of global challenges from climate change, the one truly existential threat that we face today to the revolution in technology and the ways in which that's gonna change not just the way governments interact but the way societies function. All of that I think is gonna underscore the significance of diplomacy. Now, just as you suggested, diplomacy I think may be one of the oldest of human professions, but it's also one of the most misunderstood. It really does oftentimes operate in back channels, kind of out of sight and out of mind. And so, you know, what I try to do in this book is bring it to life, I think, for a wider readership outside people like me, card-carrying members of the Washington establishment and to do that through narrative because I was very lucky to play a modest role in much of post-Cold War American foreign policy from the highs of the end of the Cold War when I worked for President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker through the lows of the Iraq War in 2003 to the secret talks with the Iranians on the nuclear issue in 2013, the turbulence of the Arab Spring, the reemergence, the great power rivalry. But along the way, you know, I try to address some of the misunderstandings and misperceptions about diplomacy too. I mean, one of them is one of the most straightforward. Diplomacy is a very small profession in the United States. There's only about 8,000 American diplomats in Washington and around the world. Former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates used to point out that there are more members of American military bands than there are diplomats. I have nothing against military music, but you know, there's an imbalance there. The most recent budget put forward by the Trump White House a week ago proposes $40 billion for the State Department as well as all of our foreign assistance overseas and $750 billion for defense. So 19 times bigger than diplomacy. So that's one, I think, misunderstanding. A second really has to do with our role. In other words, the notion that diplomacy is just about talking nicely to people or indulging foreign leadership, something that I think the president himself sometimes is guilty of. But the truth is that diplomacy is hard work and it's about persistence. I mean, I learned that very early on in my career working for Secretary of State Baker. It looks in hindsight as if many of the achievements of that era at the end of the Cold War were kind of foreordained. Well, it didn't look that way at the time. For Germany to be reunified and remain a member of NATO within a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall was not a small achievement. I mean, that had a lot to do not just with the moment of unrivaled American influence, but also the people in Bush 41 and Baker and Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Advisor and their skill and judgment in that period too. Baker was also a very persistent diplomat which is an underappreciated quality. Outside his, he's 88 now, outside the office, his office in Houston, there's a wall that's covered with cartoons, most of which poked fun at his effort after Desert Storm, after Saddam Hussein was expelled from Kuwait to organize the Madrid Middle East Peace Conference. Again, something that seems neat in retrospect and didn't at the time. He made nine trips to the Middle East and these cartoons basically portray him as Don Quixote throughout this period, tilting at the windmill of Middle East peace.  Now, Assad had, I always thought, kind of a surgically improved bladder because he would sit there and drink cup after cup of Arabic tea, which is the custom and not budge an inch. So Baker was absolutely determined that he was gonna demonstrate his stamina and didn't budge. Our ambassador at the time in Damascus cracked about four hours into the meeting and rushed out with an invented urgent excuse that he had to make a phone call. He had other urgent business, but it wasn't that. And Baker was also, this was about hard nose diplomacy because it demonstrates that it wasn't just talking nicely. I remember vividly the number of Texas expressions that he would use with Arab leaders he was meeting. One of them was, don't let me leave a dead cat on your doorstep, which was a challenge for the Arabic language interpreter in the state department. How does that? The theory was, you don't wanna be the person I blame for this conference not happening. And even if the difficulties and interpretation were real, people eventually understood what he meant and nobody wanted to cross Jim Baker at that time too. And then the last thing I'd say that is I think a misperception has to do with risk. The truth is in the last several decades, more American ambassadors have been killed overseas than military generals have. When I ran the Middle East bureau in the state department for Colin Powell, 20% of our embassies and consulates in that bureau couldn't be accompanied by families because of the nature of the risk. Probably the hardest single moment I had as a diplomat when I was deputy secretary of state was coming back on a plane from Libya with the remains of Ambassador Chris Stevens and our other three colleagues who were killed there. So a lot of times people have this image that diplomacy is about cocktail parties and I'm wearing a pinstripe suit, so sorry I'm living up to the caricature now. But it's a lot of people, a lot of diplomats as we speak today are doing hard work and hard places around the world. So I think there are a lot of misperceptions and one of the things I try to do here is bring to life what it's like to be an American diplomat overseas today. That's great. One of the themes about this role of the diplomat that comes through again and again in the book is this tension between the long game and the short game and you describe lots of situations in the book where short term strategy doesn't seem to be well aligned with a long game or the long game is a really great idea but there's no way to get there from where you are right now. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about the persistence of the diplomat over this very long period of time often required to see what an external observer might think of as success? Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean the former British Prime Minister named Harold McMillan was once asked, half a century ago, what's the biggest factor in statesmanship and he said allegedly, events dear boy, events. And I think what he meant from that is of course you're never gonna get very far in effective diplomacy or effective foreign policy if you don't have a vision, if you don't have a strategy, if you don't have a theory of the case about what's animating the international landscape, what your own strengths are, connecting ends to means. You need to have that vision and the best presidents and the best secretaries of state, I've seen and worked for had that. But inevitably, however compelling your long game is, it's the short game as you suggested that's gonna present challenges that oftentimes shape the legacy of presidents and secretaries of state. You think of the pace of events in the Bush 41 administration. Well beyond our imagination to anticipate them. One day the Berlin Wall was falling and then Saddam Hussein was invading Kuwait and there was a theory of the case certainly in that administration, but there was also a kind of sophistication in the way in which they handled personalities and fast moving events. I mean, one of the things that was most striking about George H.W. Bush and Baker and Scowcroft is you didn't see them spiking the football on top of the Berlin Wall. The notion that's common in Washington now about restoring swagger to the State Department and American diplomacy, which is not a concept I ever associated with being a diplomat, is that it ran counter to their instincts which were much more, how do you exercise in a hard-nosed way but oftentimes in a quiet way, American influence and American power? And then the last part of your really good question on problems that you have to manage as opposed to solving. And that is far more often than not the challenge for American diplomats. It's very rare that you get those triumphal breakthrough moments, the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union. More often than not, what you're trying to do is reduce the risks involved in a particular crisis or a particular challenge or try to improve on the margins a problem so that your successors are in a better position to actually solve it. I mean, that was in many ways the thinking behind the Iranian nuclear agreement in the last administration. It's not because any of us, certainly not President Obama had any illusions that doing a nuclear agreement with Iran with this particular theocratic regime was gonna transform Iran's behavior to transform the US-Iranian relationship overnight. It was a way to remove one layer of risk in a region which had more than a share of risk and that was the risk of a unconstrained Iranian nuclear program. So that's the sort of more common feature of good diplomacy is trying to manage problems as effectively as you can. That's great. One of the, I mentioned at the outset one of the things the book does really well is describe how hard it is to make tough choices along the way. And you had a lot of instances recorded in the book that I think captured where you were unsure of the choices you had made or later thought that they were wrong or wish you had framed things differently. I wonder whether you might share with folks here an example or two of those difficult choices and where you think either in retrospect, do you think about the problem differently or you wished you had done something differently? Yeah, I mean, we don't have enough time to go through the litany of mistakes. I empathize, I mean, as a former government person, I completely empathize with that problem of too many failures to talk about. Those are only my own. Exactly. I mean, I think the challenge oftentimes is in writing something like this is your temptation is to write what you wish you had said or what you wish you had recommended. So one thing that I tried to do was I got about 120 documents throughout the course of my career, including a number from the Obama administration declassified so that my effort at least was to ground this in what I really thought and said. And inevitably when you read back through that, it's pretty humbling. I mean, as I try to discuss in the book, the most difficult period in some ways in my own career was when I ran the Middle East Bureau for Colin Powell from 2001 to 2005. And a lot of that was consumed by the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. And I've never seen in that first George W. Bush administration more infighting in Washington over that set of issues than in any of the other administrations I worked in. A lot of that in the second Bush 43 term was rectified. In a funny way, I think there was actually more continuity from that second term to the first Obama term than there was between the two Bush 43 terms. But 9-11 was a huge shock to all of us, to the American system. And I think from the president on down, there was a sense that we needed to act decisively to prevent any such attack from ever happening again. And I think the debate was over how best to take advantage of the great outpouring of support and sympathy that came from around the world after the terrible attacks on 9-11. And the drumbeat began to build pretty early on after the Taliban government was overthrown in Afghanistan to take on Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. And nobody needed to convince me or people of my generation of Middle East specialists in the State Department that Saddam Hussein deserved every bit of condemnation that he could get. I just thought, and most of my colleagues believed, that it was possible to contain that challenge and that didn't warrant a use of force. And part of the concern was less over the military challenge of overthrowing Saddam. And it was about the day after. Because given all the sectarian differences and grievances and anger that that rigidly autocratic and repressive regime was sitting on, once you took that lid off, you could imagine some of the second and third order consequences of what would happen. Now, my greatest professional regret, as I say in the book, is not acting more effectively to underscore those concerns. We tried two colleagues of mine and I, wonderful American diplomats named Ryan Crocker, who later went on to a number of ambassadorships. And David Pierce had the most depressing brainstorming session of our career, trying to figure out for Powell's benefit, although he didn't really need to be convinced of this, all the things that could go wrong on the day after Saddam Hussein was overthrown. And we entitled the memo The Perfect Storm. Now, rereading it, we got about half for the things right and half wrong. We certainly had no monopoly on wisdom. It was more a kind of hurried list of horribles than a coherent memo. It had virtually no effect on the course of decision making. But it was our effort to puncture what we thought was the unsustainably rosy assumptions of others, especially in the Pentagon and in the vice president's office at the time.  To this day, I wonder, that's one of those cases where you face the choice about whether you ought to quit. And I still find unsatisfying my answer at the time. There's a discipline to the Foreign Service, just like there is for the US military. You can't conduct the US military if every battalion commander is saying, when he gets an order, well, I don't actually think it's a good idea to go left. We should go right. But it becomes very difficult sometimes when you're faced with choices like that. But at a minimum, what that discipline as a professional diplomat requires is that you be honest about concerns that you have. Within the system, you don't get to run out to the New York Times unless you want to quit. And that's what we try to do, however imperfectly at the time. And rereading that just makes clear the imperfections in our ability to see ahead. Let me take us a little bit out of the operational side and bring up a level for a moment to think about the framework you're operating in. And at the beginning of your book, you talk about Hedley Bull, who was your mentor at Oxford and had passed away by the time I got to Oxford a decade later, but was a very big force there and I know was a decade later a big force in John's training at Oxford as well. And Bull talks in his book, The Anarchical Society, about the way in which the state system is sort of constantly in tension with either a revolutionary order on the one hand or a state of war on the other, those things maybe meet in the middle. And Bull talks about the way in which our cultural, shared cultural norms and values about the importance of institutions keep that system operating. How much did you think about those things in the course of your daily work? How much did they inform what you thought you were trying to do? And maybe to make it even harder, and do those norms still exist? Well, all good questions. I mean, Hedley Bull was a wonderful Australian academic who had a very kind of bemused view of, I was then a 21-year-old American who didn't know a lot about the world, but I was always struck just as you were suggesting by his sense of the importance of history that you had to have a sense of history if you wanted to understand how the world was working today, and it had to inform the choices that you made. And it was very much a kind of realist view, informed by history of the way in which nations and governments interacted, that they were bound to compete with one another. There was a bound to be a certain amount of chaos or anarchy in the international system, but that there was a kind of hard nose, cold-blooded interest in certain rules to regulate that competition. And I think that continues to shape my view of how the international system ought to work. You need to have leaders in that system who can help make progress toward not just establishing those rules, but also reinforcing and adapting them and reshaping them. And what I've always been a little bit leery of the term indispensable nation in referring to the United States, since I think there's sometimes an implication that problems can't get solved without us, which I don't believe is the case. I do think that there's a sense in which the United States today has a better hand to play than any of its rivals if we play it wisely, and the disciplined American leadership in the world has a role. I think on the current disordered international landscape to address the last part of your question, I think that sense of a common set of rules and the value of it for everybody, no matter how intense our competition, is really beginning to fray. In particular, as other states, both our allies and our rivals, see a much more erratic and uncertain American approach to the world, see an administration or at least a White House that seems to act as if it feels that the order that we created over 70 years is holding us hostage, that we're kind of gulliver, held down by the lilypusheins, and that we can better advance our interests in the world through a sort of muscular unilateralism. So that tends to erode, I think that sense of common purpose on the international stage, and then domestically, equally importantly, I think we're in a really difficult stage that was not invented by President Trump. I believe he's accelerated it and made it worse, but there's a big disconnect in my view as I was trying to suggest before between lots of American citizens and administrations of both parties in Washington as you and I have both experienced. I don't think most Americans need to be persuaded of the importance of disciplined American leadership in the world. People understand that 95% of the world's consumers are out there. If you wanna succeed in a very competitive global economy, you gotta be able to operate effectively overseas. People understand that climate and climate change is gonna affect our environment and our livelihood, and that depends on us working with others. People understand that the revolution in technology is changing so much of that landscape. There do need to be some basic rules of the road for how you deal with that. So I think most people understand the importance of discipline leadership. They're just skeptical of our capacity for discipline. And that's what, whether it's this administration or its successor, is gonna have to pay more attention to if you're gonna build any support in this country for the sorts of rules and the sorts of engagement on the international landscape, which really does matter more than ever, I think. We've been talking at a pretty high level. I wanna now talk maybe more in the weeds of Washington for a little bit. Being successful at your job required obviously lots of outward facing diplomacy, interacting with other countries and other cultures and other leaders. But it also requires being really good at understanding how Washington works and the bureaucratic infighting and how to play the game inside the building and how to deal with other agencies. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you learned from that experience about how to be effective in the sort of inside game. Yeah, I mean, bureaucratic politics in Washington, as you know very well, is a contact sport. It can be very difficult to advance a point of view, advance your institution's point of view. The State Department as an institution has not always been renowned for its bureaucratic ability in Washington. Individual diplomats can be very innovative and very entrepreneurial, but as an institution, the State Department is rarely accused of being too agile or too full of a mission. And so part of that is just kind of how we act, I think, in bureaucratic politics in Washington. I've seen different administrations with different strengths and weaknesses. It was the intersection of transformational events on the international landscape and a group of people that I think were particularly experienced and worked particularly well together in the George H. W. Bush administration, which is how I start the book, that made for an effective policy process. Brent Skokrat was then the national security advisor and to this day I think he's the sort of gold standard of modern national security processes, a process that wouldn't get wrapped around the axle. It was capable of helping the president make decisions, but it was also disciplined in the sense that it tried to look around the corner at second and third order consequences. I mean, there were times when the process broke down. I mean, I think that was true in the run up to the Iraq war, as I described before, where too often differences, pretty profound differences in view were papered over rather than addressed. I think there were other instances, as you know from service in the Clinton administration in the 90s where here was an administration in terms of the interagency process that tried to integrate in the post-Cold War era, international economic issues and economic security issues more intimately into the policy process, which was overdue, I think, in the Obama administration for all the criticism that President Obama got sometimes, I think unfairly for an overly deliberate interagency process, you know, having seen the alternatives, I'd prefer overly deliberate to more impulsive sometimes. But to be fair, there were times when, you know, you do the 97th interagency meeting of deputies, of people like me, the number twos in agencies, and I spent far more time in those meetings in the room that has no windows in the White House, the situation room that I did with my own family in those years. And there were times when you'd have the 97th meeting on a really difficult subject like Syria, and the natural temptation was to ask the intelligence community for yet another assessment of what Bashar al-Assad or the Russians or the Iranians might do, just as a way of kicking a can down the road. My concern in the current era in this administration is that I don't really see any process. You know, policy gets driven from tweet to tweet. And I say that because, you know, we've all been fortunate in a way, now almost two and a half years into an administration, where there hasn't been a prolonged international crisis. Any administration I've been a part of or have watched over the years, you almost inevitably end up, whether you like it or not, with one of those kind of crises. Those are the moments when you need a process that's disciplined, where you need people who are accustomed to that, where you need people in senior positions and you look at the number of vacancies in my old institution, the State Department, or the Pentagon, or other places right now. And it does give you a cause to worry about how you deal with a prolonged international crisis. And that's where process does matter. You talk in the book in various spots about some of the weaknesses of the structure of the State Department. It's hierarchy, it's lethargy. Are there strategies? And I should say, I mean, you know, having spent only one year at the State Department and then moved over to Treasury, I saw a big difference between the process issues at State versus Treasury. Are there things that you think the State Department could do to make it a more effective player in the arena? Sure, yeah, I mean, you know, we've tended, again, this is just honest self-criticism to get in our own way sometimes bureaucratically. You know, we've added layer, it's kind of like repainting your bedroom 17 times. You know, kind of layer on layer of bureaucracy sometimes, which tends to reduce people's sense of initiative.  I remember one time when I was Deputy Secretary of State, I got a memo, this is like one of my last months on the job, that was about half a page long on a very mundane issue. Attached to that half a page was a page and a half of what are called clearances. So every imaginable office, and many that were unimaginable to me, had offered their views on this and the result was a kind of homogenized view and homogenized language, which didn't do us any favors when we were trying to, again, in the context, sport of bureaucratic politics in Washington advance our points of view. I've seen other times when, you know, particular Secretary of State or senior people there were quite effective too. But I think there are lots of things we could do. We always talk about diplomats as gardeners, you know, as people who try to constantly look at the jungle that's growing on the international landscape and prune and cut back and cultivate. We sometimes don't do such a good job gardening our own patch of turf and that we could do better at. I wanna switch gears now and pick maybe just a handful of particular problem areas to focus in on and then we'll see how many we can get through. There are too many hotspots in the world today. But maybe we'll start with Russia because that's been such an important part of your career among others and also a huge set of issues facing the United States relationship today. Maybe you could start with a level setting for the audience of where you think the relationship is now and what issues you're worried about. And then to the extent that you can help us chart a path that's maybe 10 years out that might look different from today. I'd love to hear your thoughts. All the easy questions, yeah. Well, I guess I'd say, I mean, I think we have to be realistic about where the U.S.-Russia relationship is today and about at least in the near term over the next few years in dealing with Vladimir Putin's Russia, what's possible and what's not. I mean, I think we're gonna be operating in terms of American policy toward Russia within a relatively narrow band from the sharply competitive to the nastily adversarial post-Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. And I think that's just the reality. I think Putin is gonna continue to be an incredibly difficult personality to deal with. I'll never forget the first meeting I had with Vladimir Putin when I was the newly arrived U.S. Ambassador. This was in the summer of 2005.  So it's your letter from the American president that you hand to the president of Russia. And this takes place, this meeting takes place in the Kremlin, which as Jill knows very well, is a place that's built on a scale to intimidate visitors as well as new ambassadors. So you go through these huge halls and these very long corridors. You get to the end of one hall facing two-story bronze doors. And you're kept waiting there for a minute just to let this all sink in.  So he's not that big a figure, but he cares himself with incredible self-assurance. And so I'm there, the new American ambassador with my letter. Before I could hand him the letter, before I could get a word out, President Putin sauners forward and says, 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. That was vintage Vladimir Putin. Not subtle, big chip on his shoulder, a sense of kind of combustible combination of grievance and ambition and insecurity and defiantly charmless in a way. And the one thing I would say there is having served the first time I served in Russia was at our embassy in Moscow. I was the chief political officer in the early 1990s. This was Boris Yeltsin's Russia. And I say the following because I think I've always said at least that in order to understand the smoldering aggressiveness that's Vladimir Putin's Russia, you had to understand that kind of curious mix of hope and humiliation and the disorder of Boris Yeltsin's Russia. I remember traveling again as the chief political officer in the winter of 1994, 1995 to Chechnya. And this was in the middle of the first Chechen war between Russians and Chechen separatists. And I'd never seen anything quite like it. I mean, here was Grozny, the capital of Chechnya which had been leveled in large part by Russian bombardment about 40 square blocks in the center of Grozny because the Russians, you know, in the best Russian military tradition of anything worth doing is worth overdoing had as one Russian general put it at the time made the rubble bounce. Now the very sad reality is that many, if not most of the civilians killed in Grozny and that bombardment were elderly ethnic Russians who couldn't leave because they couldn't get out of, there was no escape for them too. And the Russian military, you know, the former Red Army that you saw on the road in to Grozny, the 40 miles or so from Ingushetia, the neighboring Russian republic, looked more like a street gang. I mean, albeit a nuclear armed street gang, then the Red Army, which in the Cold War was supposed to be able to get to the English Channel in 48 hours. So people like Putin and especially people in the Russian security services in that time were acutely aware of how far Russia had fallen and they took advantage in a sense of that sense of humiliation and grievance.  So looking ahead, you know, is I guess a very shorthand way of putting it, at least in my view, would be, I think it's a mistake for the United States or our allies to give in to Putin's aggressiveness. I mean, I think his interference in our elections in 2016, which succeeded beyond his wildest imagination. I think he was as surprised as President Trump on election night. I think he thought he would sow dysfunction in the American system and take advantage of our polarization, but he didn't. I don't believe he thought it was gonna have contribute to the impact that it had. But, you know, whether it's there, whether it's in Ukraine or, you know, other parts of the former Soviet Union, you know, I think we need to be quite firm. But while we shouldn't give in to Putin as we look at this pretty pessimistic near-term picture, we ought not, in my view, give up over the longer term on the Russia that lies beyond Putin. I don't mean to suggest that this is all just about Putin. There are lots of people in the Russian political elite who harbor much of the same sense of grievance and insecurity and ambition. He just puts it in a particularly pugnacious form. But I do think there's a middle class in Russia that is becoming restive. The social contract with Putin, through most of his now almost two decades as the leader of Russia, has been to Russian citizens, you stay out of politics, that's my business. What I will ensure in return are rising standards of living and rising growth rates. He hasn't been able to do that in recent years because he missed the moment when he was surfing on $130 a barrel of oil when I was ambassador to have begun to diversify the economy and innovate. And that was a deliberate choice because that, in his view, would have come at the expense of political control, which is what matters most to him and to the people around him. But I do think that that middle class, there is a deeper urge for better connections to Europe and to the West. I think people sense that that's where, one of the biggest keys to their economic future lies. And I also think that Russians are gonna chafe it being China's junior partner, just as they chafe it being the junior partner of the United States right after the Cold War too. So there's space for artful American diplomacy as you look ahead. And that's something that we also need to recognize as well. So sorry for going on so long about Russia, but... Not a small problem. No. Let me pick another easy one. Let's go to Iran. You started your career at the same time as the Iranian Revolution. One of the culminations, the end of your career, was the Iran nuclear agreement. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you thought about the Iran nuclear agreement and what do you think it was helping to achieve. And then given that the new administration is pulling out, what does that mean for the future of U.S.-Iranian relations? Yeah, another nice easy problem. I mean, I took the written examination for the Foreign Service, which in those years was given once a year at the old U.S. Embassy on Grovener Square in London, the same week that the Iranian government seized our embassy hostages in Tehran. Now a shrewder person would have seen that and wondered about their choice of professions and taking the exam for the Foreign Service, but actually it just kind of deepened my interest in the world. And Iran kind of hung over my career in a way like it did for my generation of American diplomats. There were the terrible bombings in Beirut in the early 1980s by Iranian-supported groups at our embassy, and then at the Marine barracks a little bit later. You know, the Iran-Iraq war throughout the course of the 1980s. And so, you know, by the time I got to more senior positions, the number three position under Secretary of State in Kandey Rice's last year as Secretary of State, you know, I had long believed that we needed to try to test the possibility of direct diplomacy with the Iranian regime, not because I had any illusions about that regime. I understood the way in which their actions then and still do today threaten our interests, the interests of many of our friends and partners in the Middle East. But I just thought by not engaging them directly, we were actually letting them hide behind the argument on the nuclear issue and other issues that the problem was the Americans because they wouldn't engage directly with us. And I've always thought of diplomacy, that it's both a test, that kind of direct engagement of whether or not an adversary is prepared to engage seriously, but it's also an investment in demonstrating to others that you've gone the extra mile and that the only alternative is to try to step up economic and political pressure to try to produce a serious negotiation. And so that was the logic behind, you know, what I discussed with Secretary Rice at the time and there's one memo that's now on the Carnegie website that I wrote to her in May of 2008 and then another that I wrote to Hillary Clinton in January 2009 that's virtually identical. So I mean, it shows that professional diplomats try to be consistent, at least in the views that they offer. But it was basically making exactly that argument about engaging. When we did engage directly with the Iranians, we joined our international partners in the nuclear talks, you know, they proved incapable in that early period of a serious negotiation. And we use that to increase economic and political pressure, you know, UN Security Council sanctions and other forms of sanctions, which by the beginning of President Obama's second term, early 2013, had reduced Iranian oil exports by 50%, reduced the value of their currency by 50%. So their minds were focused. So it was no coincidence that, you know, early in 2013, President Obama decided to make another run at direct diplomacy. And so we began the secret talks in Oman, which is out of the way enough place where you actually in this day and age can conduct secret talks. We did about nine or 10 rounds over the course of 2013. To this day, it surprises me that we kept that quiet. It's not an easy thing to do. It was not an easy choice for the president to do it quietly, but I am also convinced that we would not have made much progress if we had done this, given the baggage on both sides, if we had done this in the kind of blazing light of publicity early on. And we made faster progress than I expected. And so by the end of those secret talks, when we made the transition back to our international partners, you know, we had laid the foundation for an interim deal with Iranians, which froze their nuclear program. And again, the Iranians did not have nuclear weapons and still don't to this day. First, their program rolled it back in some important respects, imposed quite intrusive monitoring and verification measures far beyond any other set of measures like that and arms control at the time, all in return for very modest sanctions relief. So we preserved the bulk of our sanctions leverage for the comprehensive talks that, you know, finally resulted through the enormous hard work of Secretary of State John Kerry and the President and others in a comprehensive agreement in summer of 2015. Was it a perfect agreement? No, I mean, perfect is rarely on the menu in diplomacy. It was the best, in my view, the best of the available alternatives to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Did it solve the wider Iranian problem of threatening actions across the Middle East efforts to, whether it's in Syria to support the Assad regime or, you know, to subvert other regimes in the Arab world? No, but I would argue that when a better position to push back against that, having limited or eliminated one area of risk, namely an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program. So I think it was an historic mistake for President Trump to decide to bail out of that agreement. I think it's based on the assumption that you can somehow bring to bear unilateral American pressure strong enough that it's gonna cause this theocratic Iranian regime to either capitulate or to implode. I just think that's a notion that's not tethered to history. We can do a lot of damage to the Iranian economy, but it is pretty good at its practice of political repression at home. It's pretty good at muddling through. And I suspect that it will be able to muddle through in this sense, but we're also doing over the medium term some serious collateral damage to our relationship with some of our closest European allies in a sense doing Vladimir Putin's work forum because they're trying to hang with the agreement and I think are deeply frustrated by our decision to pull out. And we're also, I think, undercutting the utility of sanctions over the long haul because it's not just the Russians and Chinese, the German foreign minister a few months ago said publicly, the lesson here is that all of us need to reduce our vulnerability to the American financial system. And so I'm not trying to suggest we've always used sanctions wisely in the past, but it's been an incredibly effective tool when it's been applied in a smart fashion and what we're gonna end up doing, not this year, next year, or the year after, but five or 10 years from now, wake up and we'll no longer have that tool, at least in as effective a form as we've used it in the past. So I'm not a big fan of that decision to pull out of the nuclear agreement. Let me hit one last area and then I'm gonna turn it over to the students on sticking the neighborhood, Syria. What do you think that you got right and wrong in Syria and is there a path out of there now that we are where we are? Well, we got a lot of things wrong.  You know, we staked out pretty maximalist ends. You know, when the President of the United States says a particular leader must go, the expectation is that we're gonna deliver that. Now, that may be a wildly impractical expectation, but that is nonetheless kind of what you're stuck with in the United States. And I think, ironically, we, you know, while we had, we overreached in terms of ends in some ways, we underreached in terms of means. If you look at what Putin did in September of 2015 in Syria, which was a relatively modest military intervention to boost to buck up the Assad regime, who's three dozen combat aircraft, no more than 2,500 or so boots on the ground, Russian military, it was effective because he telescoped it. It wasn't done incrementally and grudgingly. He moved in a decisive fashion as deeply as I object to Russian policy in Syria. And by dragging it out as long as we did, I don't think we had the impact that we might have had if very early on, you know, we had been a little bit more assertive in our support of what was then a moderate opposition. Would that have made a difference in the outcome in Syria? I can't sit here with a straight face say that it would have because the reality was that Assad was only gonna get carried out of there on a board. And the Russians and Iranians were always gonna double down, you know, in defense of Assad, almost no matter what we did. It might have given us a little bit more, you know, diplomatic leverage in that early stage when the Russians were worried that Assad was losing altitude, I don't know. So we're left with a situation today where there's been a true humanitarian catastrophe in Syria with hundreds of thousands of Syrians killed. You know, it's the reverse of the old Las Vegas rule that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens in Syria doesn't stay in Syria. The disorder and the human suffering in Syria has spilled over beyond its borders up against the European Union, which contributed at least the migration crisis to some of the political dysfunction that you see today. Syria remains a very crowded and combustible landscape. The danger not only that Israelis will bang into Iranian revolutionary guard forces or Turks against Kurds in northeastern Syria. And so, you know, as a practical matter, I think we have to be realistic about our ambitions. One is to try to limit the dangers of that sort of escalation, and that's a challenge for diplomacy. You know, I mean, there's an argument for keeping the, you know, the several hundred US military forces that we have now in eastern Syria as an investment in the short term in that kind of diplomacy. I understand that, but I think we're kidding ourselves if we think that 400 US special operators as capable as they are, are gonna get the attention of the Russians and the Iranians who are very unsanimental about this stuff. So there's utility as you look at over the next year and harnessing that to your diplomacy, but I don't think that's sustainable over the longer term. So I'm sorry for, you know. It's a bleak craft.  I mean, I had great sympathy for President Obama's concerns on that issue because the cloud of Iraq 2003 was hanging over all this and the concern about sliding down a slippery slope into large scale military intervention. I just thought at the time at least that, you know, when we set a red line over Syria's use of chemical weapons and then Assad predictably tested that red line, killed 1,100 Syrian civilians with the use of poison gas, that that was one place where we didn't run the risk of a slippery slope where we could have responded with a punitive military strike to make the larger point that you can't get away with stuff like this, you know, on a civilized international landscape where at least you have to pay a price for it as well. Would that have solved the wider Syrian civil war? No. But I just think in that one instance that was probably, you know, the best of the available options. A lot to chew on. Let me turn things over to our wonderful students to ask audience questions and please proceed. Hello, my name is Ashton Smith. I'm an undergraduate student here concentrating in technology policy. And I'm Tonya Morrow. I'm a graduate student here concentrating in international policy. Nice to meet you both. So we have many questions here. I think we're gonna start with a few that are kind of different from the topics and not really country-specific but kind of how diplomacy operates in a sense. So the first question is, do you think that technology is hurting diplomacy and US Foreign Service in particular? Do you think the State Department work abroad will dwindle and diplomacy will be less like living abroad and more about using technology? I think it's, technology is changing diplomacy, not just American diplomacy, but others around the world, just like it's transforming so many other professions. You know, when I came into the Foreign Service at the beginning of the 1980s, we still used to write things called airgrams, which were these long, you know, like 20 paragraph analyses that you literally got someone called a diplomatic courier to pick up, put in his diplomatic pouch and fly to Washington to give it to somebody. Now, you know, so this was in the pre-iPhone, you know, pre-email age as well. The transformation in the information technology has been enormous. I, however, have enough of a traditionalist to think that that actually makes smart diplomatic reporting from embassies overseas, just like smart journalism, more rather than less important because you've got this avalanche of information and you need somebody to distill it and say, here's what you really need to pay attention to. Here's where this may lead. Here's what history tells us and our experience tells us about where all this is drifting too. So, you know, I think it doesn't erode the significance of diplomacy, but it certainly changes the way you conduct it. And the other big change is when I came into the Foreign Service 35 years ago, you know, diplomacy was about government to government relations. Increasingly, that's a large part of it, but it's also about relations between societies and how you engage people in other societies outside foreign ministries and the halls of government. And that's why diplomats, you know, have to be, you know, just as versatile and just as capable at getting outside government buildings or embassy walls and, you know, in dealing with people across other societies if you wanna understand, you know, what animates them, what makes them tick. And that's tough to do in an age where the physical risks are, if anything, increasing, but you're never gonna get any place in American diplomacy overseas if you take a zero risk approach. You just can't if you wanna understand another society. All right, I'll continue along the same path. Much of diplomatic work you describe is about persistence, dominance, don't mess with me, attitudes. How does gender play a role in perceived abilities or success of diplomacy? What differences exist for the genders in the career? Another really good question. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, I think the State Department as an institution, the American Foreign Service has made painfully slow progress over the course of the last three decades or so in looking more like the society we represent. I came into the Foreign Service, nine out of 10 Foreign Service officers were white. One out of four were female. By the time I left, the gender balance was close to 50, 50 across all ranks, but it was much worse than that at senior ranks. And in terms of ethnic diversity, we were beginning to make some progress, but still, as I said, way too slow. One of my concerns about the last couple of years is those trend lines have been reversed. And so you not only see a lot of vacancies, but you also see the progress made over those years, I think really being hollowed out now. And the truth is that it always takes a lot longer to fix something that it does to break it. And so the damage that we're doing to ourselves is gonna last for a while. The utility of embodying the society that you represent overseas is simple in my view. We always get a lot farther overseas through the power of our example than we do through the power of our preaching. And it's hard to get an audience for political openness if we don't walk the walk, if we don't look like we're embodying those principles of diversity, however imperfect our own society is. And that's one of the appeals at our best for the United States overseas. It's why there are still long lines of people who wanna give visas to this country or come here, but we're corroding that right now in the foreign service and more broadly. And I think that does real damage over the long term. So the next question is more specific to our current administration. It appears that Secretary of State Pompeo has altered policy decisions made by President Trump in multiple areas. So like military support regards to Syria, Afghanistan, have previous, Secretary of States and previous administrations also altered policy in some way or declarations made by the president? Yeah, I don't know how many policies have been altered. I mean, I think especially in the current lineup of senior officials, people are pretty attuned to President Trump's decisions and what he wants to do. No, I think in most effective administrations that I've seen, there was a fair amount of discipline. I mean, you think back again to the era that I was describing before President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. I mean, they were through most of their adult lives, best friends personally. And so they occasionally disagreed on issues. There were occasionally disconnects between them. Certainly there were disagreements amongst President Bush 41 senior advisors, but there was a fair amount of discipline there. And it was a group of people that, once the decision was made, were quite effective in following through on it as well. For all the criticism that the Obama administration sometimes gets in foreign policy, it was a pretty collegial group of people and pretty disciplined group. I don't remember any big disconnects in that sense. Part of the reason I think you see disconnects now is it's not only the erratic nature of some of the decisions that get made at the top, but it's also the fact, as I said before, is there's not really any process. And so you get a tweet which will set one direction. But because people aren't in on the takeoff of a decision being made, sometimes the landing is really messy as well. You saw that with the decision that the President tweeted, apparently right after a telephone conversation with President Erdogan of Turkey about free withdrawing US troops from Syria. And clearly he hadn't talked to the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis at the time, which was one of the reasons that Mattis subsequently resigned. So I've seen a lot of dysfunction in Washington, I've probably contributed to it at different times, but I've never seen anything quite like this. So you already touched a little bit about Russia, but there are a couple of questions here, so I'll combine them. What is the one most important thing the US can do to recenter relations with Russia, and how would you characterize the differences between Russian and American visions of utopia? Well, the first one, since that's a little more straightforward. You know, I think as profound as the differences are between the United States and Russia today, and as I suggested, I don't think there's any near-term prospect of some great transformation in those. It is important to try to develop guardrails in the relationship, even in the worst of the Cold War with the Soviets, as Mel knows very well. You know, we managed to engage the Soviets, the Russians, in pretty serious arms control discussions. We are still today the world's two nuclear superpowers. We are running the risk today that what's left of the old arms control architecture that grew out of the late Cold War period is falling apart. The agreement, the INF agreement on intermediate nuclear range forces, which is now 20 years old, is about to fall apart, in large part because of Russian violations. But the bigger danger is that the New START agreement, which was concluded in the Obama administration and which reduces and regulates the strategic nuclear weapons between our two countries, is set to expire at the beginning of 2021. Now, unless we get our acting gear in an effort to try to extend that agreement, we'll essentially be left with no architecture in managing our relationship. That not only increases the risk, given the fact that we're the world's two nuclear superpowers, it sets a pretty lousy example for the rest of the world as we try to push against the proliferation of nuclear weapons as well. So that's the one thing, one of the things I think in the near term I hope we'll focus on in this administration. Because, you know, for a new administration, if a new administration comes in and who knows what'll happen in the elections in 2020, that would be a pretty shaky inheritance to have that arms control architecture to have collapsed. Visions of utopia, I think in my experience, most Russians and most Americans are histories are much different. But the sense of individual Russians, especially of the younger generation, is not all that dissimilar from what Americans of the same generation want. You know, you want life to be better for your kids than it was for you. You want a sense of opportunity. Of course Russians are proud of their history. You know, you think Americans have a streak of exceptionalism. Russians have a quite pronounced streak of their own exceptionalism. And you'll get individual Russian leaders and ideologues who have their own view of utopia, just as you do in this country as well. But I don't think there are any unbridgeable gaps in terms of the basic views that individual citizens have. As future diplomats or people with international art careers and international politics are sitting in this room or watching the stream, what advice do you have for them as they navigate international diplomacy given the current political climate and what are tools or characteristics that are vital to achieve successful diplomacy? Yeah, well I hope that anybody in this room, students or otherwise, you know, who are considering a career in public service, whether it's a foreign service or something else, will pursue it. I'm an optimist over the medium term about what's possible for our society. We've talked a lot about what's broken, but I don't think it's impossible to address, you know, a lot of those challenges over time. You know, when I was taking the foreign, I guess right before I took the foreign service exam, I think I might have mentioned this before, but my dad, who was a career army officer, he spent 35 years in the army, had written me a letter and said, you know, as I was sort of contemplating what to do with myself after graduate school and said, nothing can make you prouder than to serve your country with honor. And that didn't really register with me at the time, to be honest, but I spent the next three and a half decades discovering the wisdom of that advice. And I'm entirely confident that there are people in this room who will discover the wisdom of that as well. This is gonna be a really complicated moment for us as Americans in our own society, but for us on the international landscape too, because as I said, it's a much more competitive, crowded, contested environment out there among states and beyond states. Climate change, the revolution in technology, it's gonna be tricky terrain to navigate, but you need people such as those who are serving in the Foreign Service today, who are hardworking, committed, patriotic, you know, who'll do their level best to advance American interests on that complicated landscape as well. So one of the things that I think is most unfortunate about the debate that you see today is the kind of disdain for public service, the belittling of public service, of its professional practitioners. I am the last person to suggest that just because you're a professional practitioner means you have a monopoly on wisdom. We get lots of things wrong too, but it's a noble profession in a lot of ways. And I think the sooner we realize that and invest in it, the better off we're gonna be as a country on that very complicated international landscape. So to revert back to a little bit more country-specific question, how do you see relations with Saudi Arabia evolving? Boy, that's another complicated relationship. I'm gonna ruin all your digestions for dinner. I'm sorry.  I mean, it's a big country. It's sitting on a lot of energy resources. It's in a part of the world that may in some ways matter less to the United States than it did 20, 30 years ago at the beginning of my career, but still matters. So I don't mean to suggest we can neglect that relationship. Healthy relationships, in my experience, have to be two-way streets, which means that, you know, it seems to me, our message to the Saudi leadership embodied in the Crown Prince, Mama Bin Samman, ought to be that, yeah, in the face of external threats, whether it's the Iranians or others, you know, we'll help have your back. That we'll be fully supportive of serious efforts at the reform and social and economic modernization of Saudi Arabia. But we're gonna be honest about instances of overreach, whether it's internal or external. Externally in Yemen, you know, a humanitarian catastrophe today, tens of thousands of Yemeni civilians being killed. And also I would argue a strategic catastrophe too, because it's not like the Iranians who's the sort of main adversary of the Saudis and their coalition in Yemen invented the Houthi rebellion. They're aiding and abetting it. They didn't invent it. And it's costing them very little and costing the Saudis billions of dollars a year. And that's a conflict that needs to be stopped. And we ought to be direct about that as the US Congress is trying to be right now. And overreach internally as well.   And we ought to be very direct about that. That's not a threat to the health. Being direct in that instance is not a threat to a healthy US-Saudi relationship. It's an investment in a healthy US-Saudi relationship because that kind of overreach is gonna create over time a more and more brittle society. Are we gonna affect the way in which the Crown Prince operates and who's in the leadership in Saudi Arabia? And that's not our business in a way. What we can do is use this moment to push very hard on Yemen, on the release of dissidents who have been protesting peacefully in Saudi Arabia. And I don't see any reason. I think it's wrong for us simply to indulge that leadership over these things. It's not only wrong morally. Does it make any sense practically in my view either? So this will be the last question. So you've talked about multiple policy areas already. For like climate policy, technology, and policies towards multiple countries. And what policy arena do you see American diplomacy most critically looking? Most critically? Most critical or most critically looking in the future. Oh. Well, I've talked about climate where I think we're, we're missing a lot of opportunities right now to help mobilize countries around the world. I think it was a big mistake for us to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. I've talked about, I think, the absence thus far of a serious American effort to work with other countries to establish some basic rules of the road. You know, on some of the biggest challenges that the revolution and technology poses. I think we're tending to treat with neglect and not always benign neglect. Some parts of the world that matter enormously. You look at Africa today. You know, Africa's population is gonna double by the middle of this century to two billion people. Not the one billion today. It's a continent with, you know, enormous possibilities, I think. And you see it in some individual African countries which, you know, have made considerable progress in recent years. But it's also a continent with huge challenges on resolved regional conflicts in many societies, poor governance, corruption, you know, food, water, health insecurities. And you know, the United States, I remember in the George W. Bush administration, the PEPFAR program that was launched to fight HIV-AIDS. I think one of the best things the United States has done since the Marshall Plan at the end of the Second World War. We working with engaged leaderships in a number of African societies have helped make a real difference. You know, brought the world, not just Africa, to the edge of an AIDS-free generation. We're in the process, if you look at the budget that, you know, was proposed by the White House last Monday of cutting significantly. A lot of those assistant programs, at precisely the moment when we might, you know, finally cement historic progress. And it just reflects, I think, a broader dismissiveness of the significance of that part of the world. And I just think that's a mistake. So that's, you know, one area I'd mention. Well, this has been just a delightful conversation and I've learned a ton. And I loved reading the book and those of you who now have the book should enjoy it. It's just a gorgeous read. We're gonna have a reception outside. We'll have a book signing opportunity with Ambassador Burns. And I wanna thank again Hank Meyer for his work and sponsoring and making possible this Vandenberg lecture. And Braun Weiser for his work, setting up the Weiser Diplomacy Center here. My colleagues, Mel and John and Susan, for their participation in this event, our special guest, Jill Doherty. So please join me in all of us together, thanking Ambassador Burns for his talk. Thank you.