Loading summary
Transcript61 lines
- [00:00]
A
Dan I'm Dan Kurtz Phelan, and this is the Foreign affairs interview.
- [00:06]
B
And sadly, you know, in all my experience in the Middle east over the years, it's the place where grand ambitions and, you know, ill conceived strategies go to die. And it is a place where pessimists always feel right at home.
- [00:22]
A
In 2024, when he was director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Bill Burns wrote in an essay in Foreign affairs about the plastic moments that come along only a few each century, and argued that the United States faces one of those rare moments today, as consequential as the dawn of the Cold war or the post 911 period. If that claim seemed bold at the time, events in the past couple of years have made it undeniable. A major war in Europe, two wars in the Middle east sharpening US China tension, an American administration committed to projecting power in new and disruptive ways. Inflection point is an overused term, but this is a moment when, as Burns argued in that essay, it really does fit. Before becoming CIA director, Burns was one of the most highly respected diplomats in recent American history. He started the secret negotiations that led to the Iran nuclear deal. He served as ambassador to Russia. As the State Department's top Middle east official, he warned internally of the consequences of invading Iraq in 2003. He has spent years sitting across the table from American allies and adversaries, trying to understand what drives them and how Washington should and should not deal with them. I spoke to Burns on the afternoon of April 1 about the course and consequences of the war in Iran, about Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine and Xi Jinping and US China competition, about the future of intelligence and about what the Trump administration will mean for the future of American power. Bill, thank you for doing this. I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast, just as I'm always thrilled to have you in our pages.
- [01:59]
B
My pleasure, Dan. It's really nice to see you and thanks so much for inviting me.
- [02:03]
A
There's an enormous amount happening in the world today that I'm eager to get your insight on. Obviously, a war in the Middle east, war in Europe, the risk of a US China war, the impact of technology on national security and geopolitics, much more. But I want to start by stepping back. Your remarkable career in American foreign policy, culminating at least thus far in your stints as Deputy Secretary of State and CI director, mostly coincided with the post Cold War era. In the essay you wrote for Foreign affairs in 2024, when you were CIA director, you pronounced the post Cold War Era definitively over. And we're now two years away from that essay and that pronouncement. How, as you've understood these past couple of years, how do you understand and describe the new era we're in?
- [02:46]
B
Well, I mean, again, again, it's great to be with you. And I should start by saying that I love the nearly four decades in public service. And, you know, somehow the Republic survived all that. So on my part, you know, after three and a half decades as a career diplomat, I did not expect to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency. But it's a job that I loved. And, you know, after four years, I developed enormous respect and admiration for the women and men who animate that institution. You know, my wife and daughters were a little bemused, I think. You know, when I became CIA director, I had managed to carefully conceal my inner James Bond or Jack Ryan or Jason Bourne. Back when President Biden asked me if I would become director, I was driving a 2013 Subaru station wagon, not an Aston Martin. But I knew that I'd have to earn people's trust at that agency. I had worked very closely with CIA officers over many years as a diplomat, but the CIA is a tough crowd. One of my friends, a former senior career CIA officer, once described the mood of the workforce waiting for a new director as kind of like the Scottish tribes waiting for the English king. So skeptical. But I traveled well over a million miles over those four years, mostly to see our officers doing really hard jobs in really hard places. And as I said, I truly love the experience over that million plus miles. What I saw was a landscape in the midst of a profound transformation, a geopolitical landscape. There, as you and I have discussed before, one of those moments that comes along maybe two or three times a century. And I had served through as a diplomat the last decade or so of the Cold War, and then a quarter century of what we unimaginatively called the post Cold War era, in which the United States really did enjoy uncontested primacy in the world. And by the time I took over as director of the CIA, we had clearly entered into a new era marked by many features, but two of which were most striking to me. First was the return of major power competition with China and to a lesser extent, Russia, after 20 years in which we were preoccupied with post 9 11, huge challenge of terrorism. And then secondly, and related to the first challenge of major power competition was a revolution in technology which is still literally transforming the way we live, work, fight, and compete in that new era. On that new landscape, I still believe that even if the United States was no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block, we had a stronger hand to play than any of our rivals. And the question, of course, coming back to your original point about what's happened the last couple years, is how do you play that hand? How do you play that strong hand? For the six presidents, three Republicans and three Democrats, that I served over many years as a diplomat, the United States generally applied, through Republicans and Democrats, a form of enlightened self interest interest, which was, at least as I always saw it, a blend of hard power and soft power, a blend of the coercive influence that a strong military and strong economic leverage can bring to bear, and then the more persuasive power of diplomacy and economic and development assistance as well, backed up by institutions, strong national security institutions with apolitical public servants who can make that work, and a network of allies and partners, partners that set us apart from relatively lonelier rivals like China and Russia. And all the major achievements through that era, the Cold War and the post Cold War era, reflected that blend, including the Marshall Plan just after the end of the Second World War, and the PEPFAR program under George W. Bush, which laid out the sort of power of our example in saving tens of millions of people around the world from hiv, aids. There's an alternative way of approaching this, and that's what we saw previewed in the first Trump term and I think on dramatic display over the last almost year and a half now in the second Trump term. And that takes that concept of enlightened self interest and puts a much sharper focus on the self part and less on the enlightened part. To be fair, I think one of the sources of the appeal of that alternative approach have been some of the mistakes and the grave errors that we made when we didn't act in so enlightened a way. Iraq 2003 being one of the biggest examples of that too. But this is a sort of different concept as well, which is much more focused on hard power at the expense of soft power. Very dismissive, I think, of the institutions and the whole tradition of apolitical public servants, and dismissive if not hostile towards some those alliance relationships in particular today, NATO. And it's built around a worldview, I think, that holds that most big decisions should be made by three big guys sitting around a small table, Putin, Xi and President Trump. And recalling the famous saying by Thucydides thousands of years ago that the strong do what they can and the Weak suffer what they must. And it's a much different view of how the world works. And that's sort of, I think, where we are today. And I think the danger in all that, and I've written this before, is that with the demolition of some of those institutions, that career tradition of career public service, the kind of diminution of focus on the importance of a network of allies and partners and, you know, a preoccupation with hard power almost exclusively is a form of sort of slow motion, major power suicide, achieving for some of our biggest adversaries exactly what they hope to achieve over decades. But the fact now is that it's mostly self inflicted.
- [09:24]
A
There's a lot I want to pick up on there, but I want to linger for a moment on this big picture point that you're making and with a sense of what kind of hand we had. I think the intelligence community in the CIA at its best moments is supposed to be speaking truth to power, as I believe a motto in the, in the, the lobby of the building you
- [09:41]
B
sat in has it, I passed it every day on the way to work.
- [09:44]
A
Yeah, that's right. And you know, there's been a pervasive sense. I think this animates a lot of, a lot of the support for Trump and Trump's rhetoric, but I think it is more pervasive in the American foreign policy world and American society right now. And that's a real kind of sense of pessimism about, about our place in the world, the sense that we botched our opportunity in the post Cold War era. And, you know, you mentioned some of those mistakes, but I think, you know, a much deeper sense that we, we kind of missed whatever opportunity we had. As you left CIA a little over a year ago, how did you understand America's position in the world? I mean, how did you, if you were, if you were speaking truth to power, did you agree with that sense of pessimism or is that too great?
- [10:23]
B
No, I mean, I'm generally an optimist. I mean, I'm a realist about some of those mistakes over the years. I'm a realist about sort of shifting nature of power in some ways on that landscape we were just discussing. But I'm an optimist in the sense that, as I said, I still believe the United States has a better hand to play than any of our rivals. And the question is, how do you play it? But over the last year and a half, I've been increasingly worried about the erosion of trust on the part of our allies. And the corrosion of institutions and alliance relationships, too. And I think that that can make it much more difficult to play that hand wisely. And that's really what I worry about, because we're doing generational damage to ourselves right now, I think. And you've had 25% of the career officers in the State Department have either been removed or pushed out. And I worry that in the intelligence community, what you're seeing is the emergence of a kind of looking over your shoulder culture where people are no less committed to speaking truth to power and providing, you know, collecting the best intelligence they can, conducting the best operations they can, providing the most straightforward analysis that they can. But it's a world in which I think people sometimes wonder, even the best people, about whether, you know, all of that effort is as much of an audience, you know, when you have the court politics of this administration and a president, you know, who still to this day seems convinced that he knows better than anybody else does.
- [12:01]
A
One really striking feature of the essay you wrote for Foreign Affairs a couple of years ago was the emphasis on intelligence diplomacy and intelligence sharing and working closely with our allies, both in the Five Eyes intelligence network, but also more broadly. There's been reporting about increasing hesitance on the part of some of those allies to share intelligence with us. Given the effect on those institutions that you've described, do you worry about intelligence sharing both in this moment in history but also going forward, given what we're seeing in intelligence institutions and some of the fears we're starting to hear?
- [12:34]
B
Yeah, no. I mean, I do worry about that, too, and I don't base that on any inside evidence at this point, too. I think there's still a lot of effort put into intelligence partnerships, and we certainly, during the four years I was at CIA, put a great deal of effort into doing that, recognizing again that they're huge assets for the United States, even given the size and strengths of the US Intelligence community community, we benefit by working with others as well, and it becomes an important part of the overall relationships with a lot of countries. But I do worry that that erosion of trust can produce a diminution of some of the most important of those partnerships, too. As I said, I think they're still treated with a great deal of importance. And I think on both sides, the US Side, as well as our allies and partners, there's a sense of the importance of preserving it. But I do worry over time, if you erod trust, it tends to affect everything in national security relationships.
- [13:34]
A
And what would threaten that trust, again, without getting into specifics. What would kind of threaten that trust in a lasting way, to your mind?
- [13:40]
B
Well, part of it is just in the broader geopolitical sense, worried about if, to the extent the president keeps talking about NATO no longer being as important to the United States as it has been for decades and decades, and not necessarily pulling out of NATO in a formally way, but de emphasizing it as well, that to tends to then spill over into intelligence relationships as well. And certainly for the culture of most intelligence services, including the CIA, people are very careful about sharing intelligence, particularly human intelligence, because you're potentially putting at risk some of your most important assets and putting their lives at risk as well. And so that's an area where in any era, culturally, intelligence services are very protective. But I think particularly against the back backdrop of an erosion of trust, it can make people even more wary about that, too. I hope very much that's not the case, but that would be the sort of worry as you look a bit further down the road.
- [14:45]
A
I was also struck in reading that essay by the emphasis you put on human intelligence. Even in a moment when technology is transforming so much of what happens in the intelligence world and more broadly, I think there's a popular sense that it's becoming harder or close to impossible to really perform human intelligence, especially in challenging situations in China and Russia or elsewhere where there's so much surveillance and it's harder and harder to get people in. But you projected, at least in that essay, a sense of assurance. How do you see the changing role of human intelligence, and how do you see adaptation to what are surely greater challenges to carrying it out than would have been the case a decade or two ago?
- [15:26]
B
Well, I mean, certainly just as you said, Dan, in a world of smart cities and biometric data and facial recognition, and it's a lot harder to conduct traditional human intelligence, especially in places like China or Russia. But it's not impossible. And you know, the challenge is to master those emerging technologies as well or better than our rivals do. And we put a lot of effort into that. I'm certain that that's continuing today. And, you know, we took advantage of what was a kind of once in a lifetime opportunity to recruit Russians once Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine and made significant advances in recru including Russians. I mean, even to the point of putting out a series of three videos that aired on Telegram and reached pretty wide Russian audience and never once mentioning the name Putin, but appealing to people's sense of genuine national purpose and appealing to their sense that corruption was at the core of the rot in that political system as well, and produced, as I said, significant results there. And we set off on the same kind of effort with regard to China as well, and also made similar progress. And I think that's been built upon in the last year and a half.
- [16:46]
A
I want to come back to both China and Russia, but first I want to focus a bit on Iran, because that's, of course, front of mind for most of us right now. You've spent, I think, probably more time negotiating with senior Iranian officials than almost anyone in the United States States at this point. You and Jake Sullivan led the initial secret negotiations that eventually resulted in the Iran deal, the JCPOA, and the Obama administration. It was, I think, a surprise to many observers that the Biden administration did not get back into JCPOA, but of course got to 2025 with kind of setting the stage for some of the Trump moves that we've seen in the last year. As you saw the problem, the Iran challenge a year ago, how did you assess both Iranian capabilities and intentions, especially when it came to the nuclear program, which is kind of top of the list of our concerns when it comes to Iran?
- [17:32]
B
Yeah, well, certainly, I mean, negotiating with Iranians is probably the source of much of the gray hair you see on this screen. And the first thing I would say is I don't need anybody to persuade me of the dangers that this Iranian regime poses. I mean, Iran's an issue that hung over most of the nearly four decades of my career as a diplomat and then as an intelligence officer. I took the exam to join the U.S. foreign Service in November of 1979, a day after the seizure of the hostages at our embassy in Tehran in the spring of 1983. I had friends and colleagues from both the State Department and the CIA killed in the terrorist attack on our embassy in Beirut, which was guided and directed by the Iranian regime. And then, as you said, Fast forward 30 years later, I led the secret talks with the Iranians on the nuclear issue, which produced an interim agreement. And then a year and a half later, the comprehensive nuclear agreement, which was not a perfect agreement. Perfect is rarely on the menu in the Middle East. But it was certainly a solid and good enough agreement. And I think it was a serious mistake when in 2018, in the first Trump administration, the White House decided to pull out of that, just as I fear that it was a mistake five weeks ago to launch what in effect is a war of choice along with the Israelis against that Iran regime. I think the reality is that after the 12 day war in June of last year and June of 2025, the Iranian regime objectively has been in its weakest position in the 47 years since the revolution, with its nuclear program not obliterated but severely degraded. Same with its ballistic missile inventory, same with its proxies, in particular Hezbollah in Lebanon. Same with its air defenses. His. Well, and so that was, I think, the reality that this administration faced five or six weeks ago as well. And I say war of choice because I don't believe there was any imminent threat to the United States. And I think the intelligence community, from everything I read in the media, believe the same thing. And as best I can tell, the rationale for going to war five weeks ago was partly about finishing the job, taking advantage of that moment of historic weakness. And part of it was also the perceived opportunity to bring about regime collapse, to push this regime over the edge after all the popular demonstrations at the very beginning of 2026, and produce either true regime change or a more pliable regime, in part, I think, based on the deceptive analogy of the operation Destach Maduro in Venezuela, the theory that there was a Delsey Rodriguez within this Iranian regime who was waiting to raise his hand in this case because it wouldn't have been a woman, sadly. And I think it's also a reminder of the truism that wars are a lot easier to start than they are to finish, especially when you have only a hazy idea of where you think the finish line is. And think, furthermore, there were sort of two fundamental misreadings of this Iranian regime. The first is about its durability. This is a regime that is inept at many things, like managing its economy, but it is designed to preserve itself and designed to repress its own people and designed to withstand even the decapitation of its senior leadership. And then the second misreading, I think, was about how it was would react to the launching of that war. And I think it was sadly, entirely predictable that it would react by trying to regionalize and even globalize the conflict, because I think it was animated by the view that it could absorb more military pain than the United States could absorb the economic and political pain that it could inflict by disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and by taking advantage of the relative vulnerability of energy infrastructure in the Gulf Arab states as well. And that's, you know, that's what we've seen unfold. And it's left, I'm afraid, you know, us in a position where we're in a pretty deep hole right now, and all the options for getting out of that hole are difficult.
- [22:05]
A
I imagine you were not especially surprised by the remarkable level of penetration of Iranian decision making in military systems by both the US And Israel. Has anything in that Iranian response surprised you, though? If Trump had been listening to his briefers, would he have expected all of this, or have there been surprises that we've seen?
- [22:24]
B
No. I mean, I think, as I said, the durability of this regime, the fact that it would find a way even if you decapitated the senior leadership, including the former Supreme Leader, they've been preparing, not just since the 12 Day War last June, but for many years before that, to withstand that kind of a war, something that they unfortunately anticipated for a long time, and that they would react asymmetrically in the sense that they knew they couldn't compete with the US And Israeli militaries. And in some ways, that becomes a classic intelligence, but even more policy problem of a failure of imagination. You draw analogies from the experience in Venezuela and assume that you're dealing with the same kind of players in the Iranian regime who are going to be very transactional about this. And these are folks, especially in the Revolutionary Guards, but also on the part of many of the theocrats in that regime who see this as kill or be killed. And that's a much different kind of mentality as well that I think we face. And that even with the objective demolition of lots of the means that this regime had, ballistic missiles, nuclear program, the demolition of the air defense system, they didn't have much of a navy or air force to start with. They still have no shortage of drones. They still have an ability to inflict economic and political pain. And I think that was all pretty predictable.
- [24:04]
A
You've spent time negotiating with Abbas Haraghi, the current foreign minister. I imagine you've been tracking the new Supreme Leader, the younger Khamenei, for a long time, the speaker of the Parliament, Koff, who's said to be powerful at this point. How do you understand these different players? How do you kind of assess decision making within Iranian policymaking circles at this point, to the extent we have any sense of what those dynamics are?
- [24:29]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think what we're left with today is not regime change, even though I know the president has asserted this. It's a change of personnel within the regime. In some ways, it's certainly a much weaker regime, but it's also one that's even nastier and more radical and less open, even to the kind of compromises that may have been possible before the war. For from what little I understand of the negotiations that were going on before then, it's a regime and a group of people that's still capable of decentralizing some of the decision making in terms of their responses to steps that we took during the war and still has, even in its weakened state, the ability to inflict pain as well. And I think has the sense, and has had the sense since this war, war began, that victory is survival and that if this regime still survives, and it looks like it will right now, it's going to see that as a triumph, even though it'll be kind of hollow in many ways because they're still left with a badly dilapidated economy and with no real ability to build on that and popular animus that still exists. What I fear is, so I've believed for a long time that this is a regime that's on a kind of one way street to its eventual collapse. But I worry that in this war what we've done, rather than accelerate that moment of collapse, is slow it down a little bit. Even if I believe at the end of the day, whenever that is year, two years, three years from now, you're going to see a regime that's very hard to sustain itself because it's so deeply unique, unpopular at home and its broader strategy is just unsustainable given all the damage that's been done to it. But I don't think that's what's going to emerge as a direct result of this war.
- [26:25]
A
If you were in one of your old jobs, one of your diplomatic roles, as, I don't know, Assistant Secretary of State for Middle east or under Secretary of State, both jobs you held under presidents of both parties. And you were charged with going to negotiate with the Iranians this week or next, whether those happen in, in Turkey or wherever else, how would you be trying to wind this down? What's a kind of plausible positive scenario?
- [26:50]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, first, this is one of those situations that keeps your nostalgia for public service under control because it's, you know, as I said before, it's a very difficult set of choices right now. The negotiating positions, at least as I understand them them have very wide gaps right now between the 15 points that the US administration evidently suggested and where the Iranians are right now. The Iranian regime seems intent on ensuring two things because they're looking to avoid a situation where, as the Israelis put it, the grass is going to get mowed every six months or so. So they're looking for some form of long term deterrence and security guarantees, which would be very hard for us and the Israelis to do, and not just a simple ceasefire. And second, they're going to look to maintain the leverage that they've rediscovered by disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and use that to obtain at least, if not direct material benefit. They've insisted on war reparations, which aren't going to happen, but whether it's setting up a toll booth effectively in the Strait of Hormuz or anything else, so that they recognize the huge challenge of economic recovery coming from this, and they're going to be looking for some means of being able to manage that as well. And so that sets up a really difficult negotiation right now. The second option is military escalation, and people have focused a lot of attention on some of the possibilities. Take Carg island, the main bit of Iranian energy infrastructure at the northern end of the Gulf, or some of the islands in the Strait of Hormuz, or going after what is apparently a fairly large stockpile of 60% highly enriched uranium, whether it's in Isfahan or Natanz, to ensure that the Iranians can't use that if they try to weaponize their nuclear program, or even even trying to take at least some points along the Iranian shore in the Strait of Hormuz to try to reopen the Strait itself. But all of those carry huge risks. And then there's the third option, which is effectively declaring victory, and the inversion of the old Colin Powell Pottery Barn rule, which was, we break it, we own it. Instead, it would be, we break it, you own it, and it's over to you guys, whether it's European allies or Gulf Arabs or anybody else, to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. And that becomes a kind of hollow declaration of victory, I think, in a lot of ways, especially given what doesn't get as much attention today, but the wider consequences of the first five weeks, at least, to this war, which is to create two big winners, Russia and China. I mean, I know we'll talk about Russia in a minute, but for Putin, this has been a lifeline, both in terms of more revenue as a result of higher energy prices and his ability to export more and diminished military inventory on the part of the United States for the kind of things that the Europeans want to acquire from the United States and then provide to President Zelensky in Ukraine, especially air defense interceptors as well. So from Putin's point of view, at a moment, moment when he was beginning to feel, I think, genuine economic Pressure and quite significant battlefield losses. Well over a million killed and wounded on the battlefield. This is, as I said, a lifeline. And for China, I think the consequence, at least so far, even though they're obviously worried about their access to Gulf energy, has been that every week, every month that the United States is preoccupied in the Gulf or in the Middle east is a week or a month or a year in which the United States is less focused on the Indo Pacific as well, which, from the long term strategic point of view of the Chinese, as well as Putin and Russia, is a positive.
- [31:00]
A
Is there any risk in the aftermath of this war that Iran would in fact be able to dash toward a bomb and then we would either not see it or not be able to stop it? Is that a thing that keeps you up at night?
- [31:12]
B
Yeah, it does. I mean, it's something that worried us in the last year or two that I was director at CIA. The possibility that they could make a dash in the absence of the kind of intrusive verification and monitoring that the Comprehensive Nuclear Agreement had set up and which had largely atrophied in the years after the Trump administration, administration pulled out of the nuclear agreement, that they could try to do that, although we didn't see any evidence that there had been a decision by the Supreme Leader to reverse his edict at the end of 2003 to at least pause their weaponization program. So it's possible, I think given the quality of Israeli and US Intelligence, there's a fair chance that we would see it happening. But it's a lot more complicated right now in the absence of having inspectors on the ground. But it's a significant order. Even if you're not talking about recreating or reassembling the entire nuclear infrastructure, much of it has been destroyed. Now, if you decided to make a determined effort to build a crude nuclear device, you still have the know how to do that, and you still have, have a significant amount of over 400 kg of 60% highly enriched uranium. You could have the means to do that. I'm not certain that this Iranian regime would set off down that path. I got a lot of other preoccupations right now, but given what I said before, that you now have a regime that's weaker in many ways, but also even nastier and more radical. This is a regime that, that we'll certainly seriously consider trying to do that.
- [32:53]
A
I went back and read the memo you wrote ahead of the Iraq war when you were the Assistant Secretary overseeing the Middle east, diplomatically warning against the war, warning of some of the consequences of that war. It's kind of remarkable that we're at another moment more than 20 years later where the 82nd Airborne is back on its way to the region and we're talking about regime change and sending troops into another Middle Eastern country. I'm just on a more conceptual level, how do you kind of make sense of the intractability of these problems, the fact that we seem to keep repeating these mistakes?
- [33:29]
B
We don't learn a lot. We don't learn all the lessons that we should. And we sometimes have a short attention span for issues like that. The war in 2003 in Iraq seems a little bit distant right now, and it should be shouldn't, because the lessons of that experience ought to have been seared in our memory as we weigh choices about decisions like the one the president made five weeks ago to go to war with Iran. Especially when, as I said before, it's a war of choice. It's not something that was driven by an imminent threat. And sadly, in all my experience experienced in the Middle east over the years, it's the place where grand ambitions and ill conceived strategies go to die. And it is a place where pessimists always feel right at home. And that ought to be instructive for us at least to weigh those kind of choices very carefully. And I just think also I talked about some of the institutional damage that's being done. I'm not sure that you have, I mean, all of us bitched and moaned sometimes about the number of interagency meetings and everything else, and different administrations I worked in. But I much rather err on the side of having too much process than no process at all on some of these issues, too, that enable you to think about issues like, okay, what happens if the Strait of Hormuz is blocked or disrupted? What should we be thinking about in terms of evacuation? American citizens, some places in which they might face considerable risk? How should we think about managing our embassies overseas? There's lots of different questions like that that sometimes just don't get the attention they deserve when you have an absence of process.
- [35:21]
A
We'll be back after a short break.
- [35:31]
C
The world doesn't wait. Neither should you. At Indiana University's Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, nearly 96% of graduates are employed in service or continuing their education within six months. With programs in international studies, foreign languages and global policy, and faculty who are active voices in the field, you won't just learn about the world, you'll be ready to work in it. Take the next step. Apply today@hls.in. May 14th 17th Independent brings together over 100 artists for a four day art fair in New York. Among the highlights, Comme des Garcons will present more than 20 recent semi unique selections created by by the House's founder, Ray Kawakubo. This will be the first New York presentation of its kind in nine years. See why the New York Times calls Independent an art world institution and discover what's next in contemporary art. Visit independenthq.com to learn more and book your ticket today.
- [36:45]
A
In addition to being the American who's probably spent the most time negotiating with senior Iranians, you've also spent as much time with anyone with Vladimir Putin, both as ambassador to Russia during the Bush administration and also in your more recent jobs. I'm fascinated by a couple of moments with regard to the war in Ukraine when you were at CIA. The first is this moment in the fall of 2022 when and all the reporting suggests that people within the administration were pretty acutely concerned about nuclear use. This was a moment when Russian troops were losing ground and there was fear of a kind of precipitous collapse of Russian lines. And reportedly the intelligence community thought there was a 50% chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon. People can write in foreign affairs and elsewhere that the Biden administration was overly sensitive about such risks, but I realize it does feel different when you're in those chairs and that that the fact that you were one of the people making that warning, I think made people take it seriously. I'm fascinated by how you kind of thought of Russian decision making in that moment and what made you take that risk seriously?
- [37:54]
B
Well, I mean, I think first, whenever you're dealing with a significant nuclear armed power like Russia, you're the president of the United States, you have to take risks seriously like that. And we had collected some intelligence which suggested that there was at least some contingency planning going on. And this was a moment where the Russian military had broken and ran east of Kharkiv in the eastern part of Ukraine, where the Russians were in an untenable position on the other side of the Dnipro river in Kherson and were pulling back. And I think our judgment at the time was that if a situation emerged in which the Ukrainian advance continued at a rapid rate and put at risk Putin's grip on Crimea, that that would be a circumstance in which he'd at least consider the possibility of using tactical and nuclear weapons. We didn't believe that there was a high likelihood that his grip on Crimea was going to be put at risk then just because the Ukrainians said, thanks to their courage and innovativeness, had made huge progress, but also they needed to regroup as well, too. And the Russians had begun to use their head and pulled back across the Dnipro more defensible position. So I didn't think there was a high likelihood that circumstance was going to emerge, but it was sufficiently serious, even if it was a marginal likelihood, that we had to act. And we did that. I mean, the President sent me to talk to one of my Russian counterparts, Sergei Naryshkin, the head of their external intelligence service, the SVR. I met in Turkey in November of 224 hours of my life that I'll never get back because he was as polemical as you can imagine then. But he did get the message. And this was one instance where the Chinese, both privately and publicly, made clear that they didn't want to see any use of nuclear weapons as a result of the war in Ukraine. And Xi's was a voice that Putin couldn't afford to ignore as well. So for all those reasons, I think think it was right to react energetically to that kind of a potential threat, even if the likelihood of it happening was not particularly high.
- [40:13]
A
The other really essential role that intelligence has played in the Ukraine war is through strategic declassification, as you put it in the Foreign affairs essay, the released declassification of intelligence about Russian intentions to make clear what is going on and what is going to happen. And this, in some ways, I think, really determined some of the early Russian failures in the war. As you were sitting in CIA in that job, how did you kind of balance risks and rewards? What was the discussion around the strategy? And do you think we've lost the ability to use it just given the lack of trust in our institutions at this point?
- [40:50]
B
Well, I think that's a real challenge, too, because there were a lot of skeptics, you know, in the run up to the war when we became increasingly convinced that Putin was going to launch a massive invasion against Ukraine. And, you know, that was reinforced for me when the President sent me to talk to Putin and some of the knuckle draggers around him in early November of 2021. And I found Putin utterly unapologetic. You know, we've laid out. I laid out, you know, in pretty graphic detail, unusually, what we knew about their invasion planning and also the consequences that would flow from his going ahead with that invasion plan. And he was, as far as I could tell, sort of convinced that this was his moment strategically, to control Ukraine and its choices, about which he had had a singular fixation for many years, certainly over the years that I had known him as well. And I was also proud of the fact that we provided credible early warning of what was coming. It was kind of lonely period, because it was really only the British intelligence services that shared that conviction that invasion was coming. Many of our other closest allies were pretty skeptical. And we invested a lot going back to 2014 in the annexation of Crimea and working with the Ukrainian services to put them in the best possible position to defend themselves. I think the credibility of our intelligence helped the President to build a strong coalition of countries to. To push back against Putin's aggression and help the Ukrainians defend themselves. And then I think the strategic declassification for which the President deserved credit, President Biden, I think, was very useful. I had watched Putin over many years create false narratives or stage what are called false flag operations to try to pin the blame on the Ukrainians for provoking exactly what he planned to do anyway, which was a way war. And I think by carefully exposing the falsity of a lot of those narratives and putting out, in unclassified form, a lot of what we knew, I think that turned out to be a very wise investment and a pretty effective tool. Now, the challenge, because the easiest way to lose good sources of intelligence, whether it's human or technical, is to overdo it. And Washington's a place where oftentimes people think anything worth doing is worth overdoing doing. We had to be careful about that. But I think both the process for making those judgments and President Biden's ultimate political instincts on this were very sensible one, and I think they paid big dividends. Now, you can't necessarily do that in every instance, and I do think your last question is an important one, Dan, because to the extent we're less trusted as an ally, as a partner, people are going to also be a little bit wary of assertions we're making about intelligence. We have. We built up a fair amount of credibility, I think, especially in the first. The run up to the war in Ukraine in the first year of the war. And I think that paid big dividends. But you can squander that, too, if you're not careful and if you let trust erode.
- [44:07]
A
Did Putin seem surprised by the amount we knew by what you were laying out to him in that November 2021 meeting?
- [44:13]
B
Not particularly. I mean, he's professionally trained to keep his game face on, in a way, on issues like that. I mean, ironically, a couple of his sort of senior officials, I think, genuinely didn't know. I mean, he had kept this in a very, very tight circle. And at least one of the very senior intelligence people that I met with then, I think, was actually quite sincere in his protestations that you guys, the CIA doesn't know what you're talking about. There's no plan to invade. We're not going to do it. And I think that was because he was largely cut out of the planning.
- [44:50]
A
How do you understand Putin's theory of success in Ukraine right now? How does he understand his own strategy? And what would he settle for? What might an end to the war look like?
- [44:59]
B
I think he's quite cocky right now, unfortunately. And when you look at a million killed and wounded, it's kind of hard to explain cockiness right now, too. But I think he has seen the sort of consequences of the Iran war is benefiting him. I think he is convinced that time right now is on his side, that he can continue to grind down the Ukrainians and that eventually the United States is going to lose interest. And that's, I think, how he reads the president's impatience, sometimes President Trump's impatience. And he looks at the increasing fissures in the transatlantic alliance right now. And that also, also feeds his sense that if he just keeps at this, eventually he's going to extract something that he can portray to Russians who have lost a lot in this war as a victory, and some of the components of that would be achieving at the negotiating table control of all of the Donbas, including parts of Donetsk oblast, that he hasn't, in more than four years of war, been able to, to gain on the battlefield. But he thinks he can drive a hard enough bargain in negotiations that the United States, that this administration, will want to drive to an agreement. I think he thinks he has convinced the White House that it's only a matter of time before he wins, and therefore we should negotiate a solution sooner rather than later as well. I just have not believed that. I think there are ways in which we could puncture some of Putin's hubris. Despite the benefits that I think have accrued to him as a result of the Iran war, his economy is not in great shape, and his military has its vulnerabilities as well. And thanks in part to our support, but mostly to the courage and tenacity of Ukrainians, they've managed to offset some of the obvious manpower, munitions advantages that the Russians have by the use of drone technology, electronic warfare, a lot of other things, too. So I think it's a mistake for us to accept the Putin argument that the Ukrainians are going to lose sooner or later, so should just negotiate an end to this now, because I think that's a prescription for what would be not only an unfair outcome for Ukrainians, but also set a precedent for European security for the Indo Pacific. It because Xi is watching us all very carefully, too, that we'll regret. And I think also in many respects, strategically, the stakes are higher in the war in Ukraine than they are in a war of choice against Iran right now.
- [47:42]
A
If I could ask you to indulge in nostalgia in this case, too, and imagine yourself charged with trying to craft a strategy that would lead to some kind of negotiated end of the war, what would a good outcome look like that we could potentially get to over the course of this presidential term?
- [47:57]
B
Well, first, I'm, I'm all for the efforts that the Trump White House has made to negotiate. I mean, I think that's important as well. But the question is always leverage and how do you create leverage to produce a fair outcome? And I think, you know, I, I, I believe that the Ukrainian government understands that they're not going to regain Crimea, you know, any anytime soon, even if they're not going to accept, you know, Russian sovereignty. I think that's probably true for much, but not all of the Donbas right now, too. But I think what Putin is also going to drive at is to hollow out any set of security guarantees that we and our European allies might provide to the Ukrainians, as well as commitments to continue to support their military, which is in many ways better than pieces of paper as deterrence against a repetition of this by either Putin or some successor in Moscow as well. So it seems to me the basic trade off is swallowing what will be some very painful compromises for the Ukrainian government, but being able to point to sufficiently strong security guarantees. On the other hand, that as unpalatable as this is for most Ukrainians who have suffered so much, it gives them some reassurance that they're going to be in a position where they can prevent a repetition of this, that the west is still going to be supporting them and that they have the space to strengthen both their democratic system and economic recovery.
- [49:29]
A
Have you been surprised by the speed and depth of development of the China, Russia relationship over the course of the past few years?
- [49:37]
B
No. I mean, I think it's been far more than a marriage of convenience that people sort of talked loosely about some years ago too, too. And it's not Just about the relationship between Xi and Putin, although that's certainly a part of this as well. I think it's not a formal alliance in the sense that NATO, at least as we've known it till now, is. But it's a pretty strong partnership born of mutual interest right now too. A partnership in which the Russians and Putin are very much the junior partner right now, dependent on the Chinese and way that the Chinese are not dependent on the Russians. And it really is only because of Chinese support and dual use technologies and economic support that the Russians have been able to continue the conduct of the war in Ukraine too. I've always thought as someone who spent a lot of time in Russia as a diplomat, that sooner or later Russians are going to chafe at being the junior partner of China, just as they chafed at the notion of being the junior partner of the United States after the end of the Cold War. But that's a ways down the road. And so I think for the foreseeable future we should base our own policy on the assumption that that's going to remain a pretty strong partnership.
- [50:53]
A
You made headlines in 2023, I believe it was, when you noted about Xi Jinping into Taiwan that he has in fact instructed his military, military to be ready to conduct a successful invasion by 2027. And I believe you said that I wouldn't underestimate President Xi's ambitions with regard to Taiwan. As you've watched those ambitions develop over the past few years, and especially as Xi has watched the war in Iran and the further developments of the war in Ukraine, how do you assess that risk at that point, both the intentions and the capabilities when it comes to a Chinese invasion?
- [51:26]
B
Well, I mean, 2027 was a readiness goal which we knew that President Xi had instructed the, the People's Liberation army leadership to aim toward. But it's not a decision to go to war in 27 or 28 or 26 for that matter. I think partly as a result of Xi's perception of the battlefield in Ukraine, which tended to sober him and deepen his doubts a little bit about what an objectively weaker player could do on defense if sufficiently motivated and sufficiently supported. I think he still probably has some lingering doubts about the capacity of the Chinese military to achieve at acceptable cost, a successful all out invasion of Taiwan. I think his preference right now, as far as I can see it, President Xi's preference is a kind of boa constrictor approach where you squeeze the will to resist out of Taiwan, where you try to chip away what has historically been a US commitment to help Taiwan defend itself. You chip away at the conviction of some of our allies in the Indo Pacific that they have a stake too in Taiwan's survival. And you bite time in a sense. I mean, this is one case, Taiwan for half a century where kicking the can down the road may not win you a Nobel Peace Prize, but it's actually the best of the available choices too. I think the other reality is given the faculty fact that Xi has unleashed the most sweeping purge of senior military ranks in the PLA since the Cultural Revolution under Mao, is that tactically, that disarray that inevitably flows from that probably creates some obstacles in the path of sort of serious consideration of an all out invasion. That's the good news. The bad news is that I think it probably also reflects a strategic conviction for all the tactical problems that it may create. It reinforces the strategic conviction, and you quoted something I said before, that we shouldn't underestimate Xi's conviction that controlling Taiwan and its choices is something that he wants to accomplish, I think over the course of his professional lifetime, or at least in the near term for China as well. I don't think he's in any rush, rush to do that. But I think one of the things he'll try to do when he and President Trump meet in Beijing in the middle of May is going to be to chip away at declaratory US policy on Taiwan. And it probably thinks he's in a good position in the wake of wherever the Iran war is at that stage to get more concessions on high end technology, technology from the US as well. And he knows the President at that point, again, depending on how the Iran war turns out, may be looking for something that he can portray as a success and change the channel a little bit on Iran. And certainly a significant trade agreement would be a part of that. But Chinese leadership will extract something for that. And I think Taiwan and technology are the two areas where they'll be most sharply focused. Focused.
- [54:38]
A
The kind of underlying question when we all try to understand what's happening with these purges and other decision making in Beijing is to really understand the kind of dynamics of power within the Chinese elite and what Xi's grip on power is, to what extent there's internal resistance to him. Real debate about Chinese strategy. What is your assessment of Xi's power and how much debate is there about out the kind of direction of Chinese foreign policy beneath the surface in ways that are kind of hard for outside observers to really detect?
- [55:10]
B
Yeah, I mean, I suspect it's the debate that may have occurred a decade ago is less likely to occur now because he's consolidated power so effectively. And that's always a mixed blessing for autocratic leaders, because what it means is that whether it's in Chinese intelligence services or in the PLO A, there's a tendency to tell a very deeply entrenched autocratic leader what he wants to hear as opposed to generating real debate about choices right now, too. And I suspect that that's probably increasingly the case too, especially since she has been so effective in consolidating power and authority right now, too. That's the flip side of doing that, is that you expose yourself more to ill thought through decisions sometimes because you don't have people who are challenging your assumptions sometimes too, because they learned a long time ago it's not career enhancing to do that.
- [56:10]
A
It's disquieting that when you look at the three most powerful countries on earth today, you have those court dynamics in all three capitals with Trump, Xi and Putin.
- [56:20]
B
Yeah, in different ways. But you're exactly right. And coming back to our earlier part of the conversation about the erosion of not just trust with allies, but of institutions and career public servants, and I'll be the last person to argue that career public servants have a monopoly on wisdom. That's certainly not the case. But you create a process where people feel comfortable and actually feel an obligation sometimes, not just to speak truth to power, but to challenge assumptions that in many ways is the best insurance against making bad decisions sometimes, too. And I think whether it was Putin's decision to go to war in Ukraine based on false assumptions, and I heard Putin say this to me for decades, that I was kind of a dim fourth grader. You don't understand. Ukraine's not a real country. It's not just a question of Russian entitlement to control Ukraine, but they need Russian guidance as well. And that was the assumption on which the fsb, the biggest of the Russian intelligence services, was providing advice to Putin. He thought this was going to be a walkover and vastly underestimated the determination not just of President Zelensky, but of Ukrainians, because Putin, through his aggression in Crimea in 2014, helped create a sense of Ukrainian national purpose that didn't exist in the same way before that too. And you can see some of the same dynamic with Xi and some of the decisions that he makes as well. And I think certainly you've seen some of that contribute to the decision making, at least as I understand it before this war in Iran.
- [58:03]
A
It does Seem that we in the United States and people in capitals around the world also underestimated the Ukrainians ahead of the invasion, that we were surprised by just how effective they were and how strong the leadership was.
- [58:14]
B
Yeah, I think the fair way of putting it is that we did overestimate the capacity of the Russian military. I think we looked at Putin's modernization of the Russian military over the two decades before that when it was shambles. I remember seeing the Russian military in the first Chechen war when I was serving the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, and it was like a streetcar gang, more than a sort of strong conventional military. But I think we assumed too much, as Putin did. I think we assumed too much about Russian capability. And part of that may have been because the decision making circle was so tight that you had a lot of relatively senior Russian military officers who were kind of making it up as they went along in the first months of the war. And you saw that in the shoddy performance of the Russian military. And a lot of that, of course, also was, as you said before, Dan, was the. The determination, the courage of Ukrainians, too. So I think it's fair, at least in my view, to say that we overestimated the strength of the Russian military, than underestimated the determination of Ukrainians to resist.
- [59:20]
A
We talked earlier about the importance of human intelligence. I want to make sure before we close that we talk a bit about technology, because that is certainly under your tenure, but I assume now is still continuing to transform CIA and the intelligence community more broadly. How do you see AI, especially changing the way intelligence works? I think we're probably just the beginning of integrating these tools. But I'm interested in how you see that change happening.
- [59:45]
B
Well, I mean, certainly emerging technologies, but particularly artificial intelligence, are critical to the future of any good intelligence service, including the CIA. And so whether you're an operations officer, a case officer, trying to recruit and then manage assets in complicated places overseas, you need to use artificial intelligence to navigate smart cities and be able to defeat facial recognition and the collection of biometric data. And we put a lot of effort, certainly in the four years I was director, and I'm sure John Ratcliffe, my successor, has continued that, not just in investing in the pool of technological expertise that's in the agency, because more than a third of all the career officers in the agency spend every day working on digital cyber science and technology issues. So it's a pretty strong in house set of expertise. But unless we build better relationships with the private sector, there's Just no way we're going to be able to compete effectively with the Chinese. And so that's what I tried to build on some of the efforts that my predecessors had made to strengthen those private sector relationships, both as a tool so that we can take advantage of new technologies to conduct those operations or to help analysts, through the use of large language models, digest the enormous amount of information that's out there, whether it's open source, generally available, or clandestinely acquired, to put the best human analysts in the place where they can do what I think open, ultimately only they can do, which is tell a president, here are the choices that we see. Here are the second and third order consequences of decisions that you might make. And so we put a lot of effort into applying large language models and AI, both for analysts and for operations officers, too, and then try to develop more flexible approaches to career paths, too. Because. Because while we welcome officers who say, I want to spend 30 years as a technologist in the CIA, the truth is that increasingly you're talking about a generation of officers who may be very much interested because of their patriotism, their commitment to the mission, their commitment to working with other smart people to deal with some really complicated challenges. They'll spend eight or nine years, but then they may also also have an interest because they're putting their kids through college or whatever to go into the private sector for a while. And so we put a lot of effort into trying to keep the door open for people to come back and bring back the benefits of experience in the private sector, too. So I think all of those are areas in which we made some headway, but which we just, I recognized at the time need to move even faster because the pace of innovation is such that that just keeping up with it, let alone getting ahead of it, is a huge challenge. But it matters as much as anything else that if not more so than any of the other priorities that I had at the Agency.
- [62:52]
A
Let me close by asking you if there are any, if there are two or three issues that you think aren't getting adequate attention in the broader foreign policy conversation we've talked about, I think the kind of headline threats we could have added Gaza or Venezuela or lots of other things that list. But what do you think work or we're not paying enough attention to?
- [63:08]
B
I mean, Africa is a continent that's often suffered, I think, and the administrations of both parties that I've worked for in different ways, from benign and sometimes not so benign neglect as well. And I think if you just look at the objective Realities of population of a continent that's going to double at least by the middle of the century. That has both incredible potential. If you look at some societies that have been able to fight corruption and are well governed, but also huge challenges of urbanization, the movement of people to cities, the challenges of job creation that that creates the potential for migration of peoples that other parts of the world then have to deal with as well. So it just seems to me there are too many other issues that tend to crowd out a focus on Africa, and I think that's really important. I think it's to this administration's credit that they focus more attention on the Western Hemisphere, which in many ways is the natural strategic home base for the United States. Now, we've also managed, and this takes a particular effort for Americans to piss off the Canadians, which I think is unfortunate. And I think we have to be careful that we don't shoehorn too much in the Western Hemisphere through the prism of counternarcotics. As huge a challenge as that is is, there are a lot of other dimensions to successful strategy in the Western Hemisphere as well. And Mexico is obviously hugely important for the United States for lots of different reasons too. So that's a credit to this administration. Even if I don't entirely buy the Don Roe Doctrine or the notion of almost brute force American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. I think there are. Are certainly American power is enormously important, but I think paying attention to a range of other issues, whether it's what the U.S. agency for International Development used to do before it was demolished, makes a big difference too, in building the kind of position in the Western Hemisphere that's seen as a kind of shared benefit by leaderships in the region as well as by the United States. Yeah. And counterterrorism remained a very high priority for me and all of my colleagues at the CIA, because even as we tried to focus attention and resources on major power, competition and the revolution in technology, we had to take very seriously potential terrorist threats. Cyber issues also, I think, get a lot of attention. I worry that in this administration, budgetary resources for cyber defense have been cut, as I understand it, even as resources have been increased for cyber offense, which I think is a good thing. But I worry a little bit that we become more exposed to cyber attacks, particularly with formidable players like China's Ministry of State Security, who have penetrated a lot of the critical civilian infrastructure that matters so much to the United States, too. So I worry a little bit that we haven't as focused as much attention and resources on that it's also striking
- [66:21]
A
how much Gaza and developments in the west bank and elsewhere in Israel have kind of fallen out of the conversation as a result of the war in Iran, I have to think that will come back as a challenge.
- [66:33]
B
Yeah, and I say that, I mean, and I say that as someone who is deeply committed to Israel's long term security interests. But if you look at the pace people used to to talk about creeping annexation in the west bank, this is at a gallop right now too in terms of settler violence and a lot that's going on there. Gaza's situation seems kind of frozen in a way right now with Gaza itself being kind of physically divided between an area that the Israel Defense Forces controls and an area where most of the population of Gaza is, where Hamas is re emerging as well. Well, and even though it's not fashionable to think about the Palestinian as issue as something that matters and it's fashionable to think that the two state solution is dead, the problem is without some progress, some credible pathway over time, not overnight, but over time toward a demilitarized Palestinian state. I don't see how you serve the interests of a Jewish democrat, democratic secure state in Israel, let alone the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians or the interests of neighboring countries like Jordan too. So you're right. I think that should be an increasing concern, particularly what's going on in the west bank right now too.
- [67:49]
A
Well, Bill, thank you so much for doing this. We could obviously go on about a bunch of these topics. I will say that both your 2024 essay and also some of the work you see did before going back into government really about the State Department and American diplomacy is still well worth reading. There was a piece you did in 2019 called the Demolition of U.S. diplomacy, which in some ways those concerns look quaint compared to what's happened since. But the warning you issue in that piece I think is still well worth hearing.
- [68:17]
B
Yeah, no, and I do worry. I mean, when you asked about what sort of keeps you up at night right now too. I just think we're going to regret the demolition of institutions and career public servants as well. Nobody should think that it's as neat as turning the clock back to the way things were before the second Trump term. It was not a perfect system and serious streamlining and reform. Any of us who served in those institutions was essential. But what's happening right now I think is just going to put us in a weaker and weaker position position to compete in an unforgiving world for years and years to come. And the kind of gleeful indignity with which people have been treated apolitical career political servants, people without a political bone in their bodies I think is shameful on the one hand but it's also in practical terms I think very dangerous for the United States over time.
- [69:12]
A
Well, on that grim note, thank you so much, Bill and we'll look forward to having you back in our pages, I hope for too long.
- [69:17]
B
Thanks Dan, very much. Take care.
- [69:25]
A
Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show@foreign affairs.com this episode of the Foreign affairs interview was produced by Elise Burr and Kanish Tharoor. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Arina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.