[MUSIC PLAYING] - Good afternoon, everyone. Glad to have you here. I'm Liz Cohen. I'm dean at the
Radcliffe Institute. And I'm so pleased
to welcome all of you to Samantha Power's much
anticipated lecture, US Foreign Policy From the Inside Out. As Harvard's Institute
for Advanced Study, Radcliffe embraces
a dual mission to foster and to share
transformative ideas across disciplines. And we do this by
convening and supporting scholars, scientists, artists,
and professionals working at the forefront of their
fields and by organizing a full calendar of
public programming, including lectures, conferences,
performances, and exhibitions. Now, today, we have
the opportunity to hear from someone
who has grappled with many of the
most daunting issues facing the United
States and the world and who has done so from a
number of different vantage points. As a journalist, a scholar, an
activist, and most recently, as a senior executive
branch official, Samantha Power has been on
the front lines, so to speak, throughout her career
in foreign policy. As a result of her
varied experiences, Samantha is well-placed to
explore challenging questions around how to balance means and
ends, pragmatism and idealism, and competing priorities
in determining the appropriate role
for the United States on the world stage. These questions
defy easy analysis, and yet, they run through
much of Samantha's work. In her first book, entitled
A Problem from Hell, America and the Age of
Genocide, Samantha indicts the US foreign
policy establishment for falling short of
our nation's ideals by failing to act against
genocide at critical moments in embattled hotspots like
Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda. More than that, Samantha charges
that the US distanced itself from these conflicts
which fell outside of its narrow national interest
by deliberately sidestepping moral responsibility. A Problem from Hell won the 2002
National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction
and the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Samantha's second book,
Chasing the Flame, Sergio Vieira de Mello and
the Fight to Save the World, takes on difficult questions
about the proper role of international diplomacy
and the proper conditions for intervention in a
world where nations' moral and strategic objectives
often compete. Here, she explores the personal
and professional evolution of Sergio Vieira de Mello,
a Brazilian-born diplomat who served in the United Nations
for more than three decades and who died tragically
in a 2003 suicide bombing while acting as
Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special representative in Iraq. Chasing the Flame was also the
basis for an award-winning HBO documentary entitled Sergio. In Samantha's telling,
de Mello began his career as someone who would freely
and forcefully denounce evil and injustice
wherever he saw it, but who then went
on to fully embrace not only the necessity
of negotiation, but also the United Nations'
powerful inclination towards non-judgment. He did this to such an extent
that some found him obsequious. De Mello even
earned the nickname Serbio for his
perceived closeness to Slobodan Milosevic during the
Balkan War of the early 1990s. Eventually, we learn, de
Mello struck a balance between the poles of
denouncement and non-judgement that Samantha holds up
as a model from which our country can learn. I quote her prescription. "Be in the room, don't be afraid
of talking to your adversaries, but don't bracket what happened
before you entered the room. Don't black-box history. Don't check your
principles at the door." I suspect this kind of
principled pragmatism combined with humility and what
Samantha has described as-- and I quote her-- "an emboldened
sense of responsibility" has animated much of her
own efforts in recent years at the senior-most levels
of US foreign policy making. Her policy positions, as
many analysts have noted, do not track with any
particular partisan agenda. Moreover, Samantha is
well-known as someone who presses her case with
both force and clarity. And I might add here something
that her fellow fellows, I think, will agree with, that
we in the Radcliffe community have had the honor and
pleasure of observing Samantha in action, as she has
interrogated her fellow fellows on an impressively
broad range of topics with the same
intensity and insight. Whatever you may think of
the current administration or the previous one, it
should be clear to all that we face new and
often unprecedented global challenges with
profound strategic and human implications. I am thrilled to have someone as
expert, as experienced, and as wise as Samantha here today to
help us reflect on these issues from the inside out,
to use her language, and to suggest a way forward. Samantha is the 2017-2018
Perrin Moorhead Grayson and Bruns Grayson Fellow here
at the Radcliffe Institute. And I'm happy to see Penny
Grayson here with us today. I'm grateful to the Graysons
for their generous support of the Institute and to Penny
for her advice as a member of our Deans Advisory Council. In addition to Samantha's
Radcliffe fellowship this year, she is on the faculty
of both the Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School. Before returning to
Harvard last fall, Samantha was a US permanent
representative to the United Nations and a member of
President Barack Obama's cabinet. She also served as
special assistant to the president and senior
director for Multinational-- Multilateral Affairs
and Human Rights on the president's
National Security Council, where she focused on UN
reform, LGBT and women's rights, religious freedom,
human trafficking, and democracy and human rights. Samantha was the founding
executive director of the Carr Center for Human
Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School. And in addition to her two
books that I mentioned earlier, she is the co-editor of another
book entitled The Unquiet American, Richard
Holbrooke in the World, an examination of the career
and writings of another diplomat Samantha admired greatly. Samantha's other writings have
appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, the New
Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. I will just add, before
making a final comment, that I want to alert
you to the fact that a film that
features Samantha and her last year in
the Obama administration is now out in the world,
available through YouTube and I'm sure other-- how else? Lots of different ways, and
the Kendall theater, too. So you can see it at home
or you can see it in public. But we highly recommend it. Here's how the
afternoon will go. After Samantha
delivers her lecture, there'll be time
for a brief Q&A. We will put a microphone
in the center aisle. We invite you to line
up to ask your question. Please introduce yourself
before you do so. And after the final
question, I invite you to join us for a reception
next door at Fay House. Now, it gives me great
pleasure to welcome Samantha Power to the podium. [APPLAUSE] - Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, everybody. Great to be here. And thank you so much,
Liz, for that introduction. I'd like to start by offering a
fulsome thank you to Radcliffe, the Radcliffe Institute, to the
Grayson family for having me here as a fellow along with
such other amazing people that I've had a chance to
listen to and learn from. I was incredibly privileged
to get to serve in the Obama administration for eight years. But one of the
disadvantages of being in national security
24/7 is it tends to narrow your perspective. And coming here
and learning about facial-recognition technology
and pirates and cichlid fish reminds me and
affirms for me why it's so amazing to be on
a campus, and especially this amazing campus. So thank you. It's wonderful to see so
many people here today who could be doing a lot
of different things. So thank you for coming out. I have spent my time thus far-- I can't believe it's
slipping away, but trying to understand the journey
that Liz described, a journey that took me from
being, initially, a journalist and activist and academic into
the messy world of politics, and specifically into Barack
Obama's Senate office, into his presidential campaign,
which I had to leave briefly, and finally into the White
House, and most amazingly, as his ambassador to the United
Nations in his second term. In coming here today
and having the chance to speak at Harvard for the
first time since I've returned and to do my-- make my Radcliffe
presentation, I considered a lot
of different topics within the broad rubric
of foreign policy from the inside out
because I'm exploring a very broad range of topics. The question I get asked
the most about, which may come up in the
discussion period, is the red line in Syria. There's a lot to say about
the person currently occupying the Oval Office and the future
of the liberal international order. I could have gone
in that direction. But given the broader reckoning
going on in our country and around the world, I
thought I would actually use this occasion
here at Radcliffe, of all places, to
reflect on a question that I increasingly
get, which is, what was it like, as a woman,
doing foreign policy in the US government and at the UN? And I stress, because
I am a professor here, but this is not an
academic lecture. It's not my normal
analytic fare. It is one person's
personal experiences from which I try to draw,
also, some lessons regarding how we go forward in the face
of many of the challenges that are being discussed
and aired, but many of which are not yet being addressed. So let me start a little
bit at the beginning. Before I began working
in the US government, I will admit that
I had never been all that self-conscious about
being a woman in the workplace. And this is partly
because I was raised by a very single-minded Irish
mother, Vera Delaney, who overcame such severe hurdles and
prejudices herself to do what she loved, which was
to practice medicine, that I compared my
lucky life, which was very privileged, certainly,
in comparison to some of the challenges she faced. This is her. This is me and my mother. [INAUDIBLE] great. She's really great. But not long after she
married my father and had me, my mother became a
doctor, at a time when married women
made up less than 10% of the Irish workforce. I grew up on stories
of her experiences in the medical
profession and in the-- in the world, which
often weren't pretty-- but they never deterred her,
she was full speed ahead-- like the one when she tried to
acquire custody of my younger brother and me so she could
bring us to the United States in order to be able to deepen
her training as a kidney doctor. And in the courtroom, the
justice mused out loud about my mother-- who at that point,
had a PhD in biochemistry and medical degree-- what right has this
woman to be so educated? [LAUGHTER] I know. But these are the kinds
of stories I grew up on. So I thought,
who's got problems? My first real job was as a
23-year-old war correspondent in the Balkans. Now, of course, it
was men, mainly, who orchestrated and fought
the wars that I was covering. Interestingly, though, among
the posse of freelancers and full-time correspondents
who gravitated to the Balkans, it was women war correspondents
who really, at that time, I think, stood out, everyone
from Christiane Amanpour of CNN, of course, to Maggie
O'Kane of the Guardian, who uncovered concentration
camps in northern Bosnia, Kate Adie of the BBC, Carol
Williams of the LA Times. These were amazing
role models for me and my girlfriends, who
are still my closest friends, to have at that stage. And although the culture that
we encountered in the Balkans was patriarchal in the
extreme, although not compared to what some of our
people here I know have gone through-- but with
very deep-rooted sexism, writing for the Western
media in Bosnia in the 1990s was a far cry for women from
what Martha Gellhorn had gone through to try to cover the
D-Day invasion of World War II. Some of you know
the story where she had to hide in the
toilet of a hospital ship and to sneak ashore
with an ambulance crew in order to cover the landing. I can't be scientific
about the difference that gender made in Bosnia. And it is even
conceivable that we women correspondents,
of whom there were many, actually enjoyed better access
to the people and events we wished to cover because the
local gunmen so underestimated us. But that said, I also don't know
a single woman colleague who wasn't, at one point,
caught off guard by a romantic
come-on from a source or left stammering her way
out of an unexpected advance. I must admit, again, that
I had not reflected much on the role that gender
played in my career at all, really, until
recently, when hundreds of brave women, and a few
men, began coming forward to share their personal
experiences of harassment, predation, assault,
exposing decades of toxic and illegal behavior
by people in positions of power. Like everything in this stage-- in this age, I should say,
it has a hashtag, #MeToo. But unlike so many other issues
that have burst into the news and then just as
quickly disappeared, #MeToo has become more
impactful on the national and the global conversation
than I think any of us could have imagined
when we first read about Harvey Weinstein,
for example, last fall. These silence breakers,
as Time magazine called its 2017
person of the year, have jumpstarted a
long-overdue reckoning. It is reaching across
professions and party lines, shining a light on the invisible
daily struggles endured for too long by our mentors, our
teachers, friends, colleagues, neighbors, grandmothers,
mothers, and even our own daughters. It is no wonder, then, that
this reckoning has also reached the field of national
security and foreign policy. Two months ago, in
November, 223 women who work in or on US
national security, including many close colleagues
of mine from the Obama administration,
signed an open letter that they titled #MeTooNatSec. You don't have to
read the letter. I do recommend
looking for it online. But that's just to give
you a hint of the letter. The letter is addressed to
the entire national security community. And it was quite
measured in tone. It made no sensational claims
about specific abusers, nor did it call out any
particular government agency, declaring, quote, "We,
too, are survivors of sexual harassment,
assault, and abuse or know others who
are," end quote. Ambassadors,
professors, diplomats, intelligence analysts, military
officers, think-tankers, and leading experts from every
part of the foreign policy community delivered a
stinging assessment. And I'll just read you
part of the letter. "Many women are
held back or driven from the national
security field by men who use their power to assault
at one end of the spectrum and perpetuate, sometimes
unconsciously, environments that silence, demean, belittle,
or neglect women at the other. Assault is the progression
of the same behaviors that permit us to be denigrated,
interrupted, shut out-- [COUGH] --excuse me, shut
out, and shut up. These behaviors incubate
a permissive environment where sexual harassment
and assault take hold." So that's just a
part of the letter. So this letter only received
fleeting media coverage, but it did generate significant
attention in the foreign policy world. And among those reacting were
the 10 Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee who forwarded this letter to
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with a warning that a
failure to remedy the problems it described would have
what the senators called a deep and negative affect
on US national security. Well beyond the letter,
in recent months-- again, a little
beneath the radar compared to some of what's
in the press each day-- women in national
security have come forward to share their experiences
of indignities and abuses, large and small, themselves
overcoming or combating, overriding the longstanding
concern that speaking out would torpedo their careers. I'll offer just
two stark examples. One widely-shared frustration
is the demeaning, often flippant attitude men in the
national security realm have expressed toward the
professional advancement or achievement of their
female colleagues. Heather Hurlburt, who
is a former speechwriter in the White House and
the State Department, recalled being hired
for her dream job, only to be told by
her boss, quote, "We held this job open for
a woman, so I hired you and dated the other
finalist," end quote. Not ideal. Others have spoken to
the dangerous culture of entitlement and
impunity that prevails in a profession that entails,
often, long foreign trips and long hours. Rosa Brooks-- some of you may
have seen this-- a defense official in the
Obama administration, described a harrowing experience
from earlier in her career with a senior foreign service
Officer who, as she put it, quote, "grabbed me and
shoved his tongue forcibly down my throat as we walked
along a deserted canal in Venice, returning from an
international law conference. It took several minutes of
skirmishing and several firm threats to shove
him into the canal before he stopped pawing
at me," end quote. Now, this problem is
obviously widespread well beyond the national security
community, as we all know, and certainly well
beyond the United States. Just last week, in
fact, the Guardian published a devastating
expose describing pervasive sexual harassment,
assault, and retaliation across the UN, often
perpetrated by senior officials. A former investigator for the
UN's internal affairs division told the paper that he
routinely witnessed cover-ups and that impunity for
offenders was the norm. As he put it, "the
only rule is not to publicly embarrass
the Organization," capital "O," Organization. Taking stock of the
many experiences shared by female national
security professionals, the political
scientist, Dan Drezner, described women in
this field as facing what he called a
gender tax, something that our male counterparts
don't shoulder. Speaking more
personally, I think it is fair to say that the first
time I began to focus on what it meant to be a
woman in the workplace was when I started to
work in Washington. And let me be clear. On that score and
on many others, I feel extremely
fortunate to have worked for President Obama, the son
of a trailblazing mother, the husband of a woman
who was once his boss, and the dedicated father of two
daughters who has said proudly, "It's important that
their dad is a feminist, because now that's what
they expect of men." In his eight years as
president-- you miss him, don't you? I know, sorry-- Obama appointed the
highest number of women to cabinet-level
positions in US history. And I must say-- and
this mattered to me a lot-- he always
gave the impression that he wasn't scurrying
around with women in binders or whatever it was
that we heard about, that someone had to make
this huge effort in order to find talented women. He projected the
sense that he was hiring the people who were
the best for the job, who happened to be women. Nonetheless, in 2009, while
women ran key government agencies, at the
White House itself, where I would work
for four years, men held 2/3 of the top jobs. And this wasn't
a new phenomenon. It was not until the Eisenhower
administration in 1953 that women began to
work in the West Wing as more than secretaries. The culture at the White
House bore similarities to office dynamics across
this great country, lots of sports metaphors
and sports outings to play basketball or golf,
ample "dude" references, and lots and lots of swearing. I was fortunate to
play basketball. So I had opportunities
to do business with senior officials outside
of our long hours in the office. I won't speak to
the swearing part. The most vivid occasion
on which gender dynamics at the White
House surfaced publicly came in December 2012
during negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff
when the White House released a photo of President Obama
seated in the Oval Office with his back to the
camera, giving direction to his political, economics, and
communications teams, as such. When critics pounced
on this photo-- someone released this photo. Someone very senior would
have released this photo, not thinking that
there was anything weird about this photo. So we start with that. So when critics saw the
photo, the White House pointed out something
even worse than releasing the photo itself. Some of you may remember. Does anybody remember that,
in fact, if you look closely, you will see, behind Dan
Pfeiffer in his brown corduroys and blue shirt,
Valerie Jarrett's leg. [LAUGHTER] She was there all along. And literally, you
had statements, people on and off the record,
coming out saying, oh, no, it's fine. Look, there's her knee. You could just see in the-- Anyway, so you can imagine
the reaction to this. Jodi Kantor of the New York
Times tweeted "Jarrett's leg as metaphor." Now, President Obama,
the enlightened guy that he is, of course, invited
senior women on the White House staff to his office or
he had dinners with them so that they could vent,
share frustrations, get a sense of what could
be done differently. And I think that
more self-awareness and deliberateness meant that
women were called on more often-- and sometimes even
when they weren't raising their hands, which happens
not only at Harvard campus, but within the White
House as well-- and also affirming the
work of his women advisors. But I think, as we all
know, numbers matter. And it was significant
that in the second term, President Obama and his very
activist chief of staff, Denis McDonough, went out
of their way to try to ensure that women occupied
an equal share of the top White House staff jobs. And in fact, in
2015, the White House released a not-so-subtle photo
of the president conferring with his advisors. [INAUDIBLE], yes. And Obama's
photographer, Pete Souza, later commented, "This
is a full-frame picture. I guess you'd say I was
trying to make a point." So at the National
Security Council, which is where I worked-- it
was part of the White House, but its own world-- in the early years of
the Obama administration, men held all the top jobs,
national security advisor, deputy national security
advisor, homeland security advisor, chief of staff,
strategic communications advisor, and speechwriter. The senior staff were known
as-- are known, I think, maybe that's one thing
that's still intact-- are still known, perhaps,
as senior directors, NSC senior directors. And my first year, I was
one of six women who were senior directors out of 26. That gives you some
sense of the ratio. One Wednesday toward the
end of our first year, one of my senior women
colleagues-- it was a fellow senior
director-- invited me and a few other women
to come to her office for a glass of wine. This quick break turned
into a 90-minute release. And after a half an hour
together, each of us called back to our assistance
to ask apologetically if they could move our
next appointments owing to urgent national
security business. We discussed not only our
experience of work at the NSC and some of our
frustrations, but also what we were working on,
what we were proud of, what we hoped to achieve. This first pretty
spontaneous invitation turned into a sacred
weekly Wednesday group. Those of us with kids
talked about the chaos of our juggling. The single women among us talked
about their latest crushes. Each of us gave each other
a quality of attention that was too often lacking
in the transactional world of Washington. And outside of
these gatherings, I think a change
crept into the way that we acted in our
larger policy discussions. Without ever discussing it or
making any conscious shift-- at least that I'm aware of--
we reflexively supported one another in meetings. Now, this didn't mean we
agreed with one another. Some of my most spirited
arguments at the NSC were with my fellow
women senior directors. We were not always on the
same page, by any means. But we engaged one another's
arguments, not simply leaving them hanging in the air, which
happened too often in larger group discussions. As we compared notes
during what became known, again, as this--
the Wednesday group, I was struck both by how
self-conscious my colleagues were as women role
models to younger women and by the lengths
to which these women, the senior directors,
went to seek out and hire young women to work directly
under them as directors. And I just have to stress
how challenging this is to do in the world of foreign
policy and national security. You really have to
fight gravity in order to have the kind of equality
of representation that we seek. And why is that? The pipeline, the
so-called pipeline of women eligible to go into
senior foreign policy positions in government is very skewed. In academia, a key feeder to
these top national security jobs, the ratio of men
to women professors who focus on US foreign policy
back when I was in the Obama-- starting in the Obama
administration was 3 to 1. Of the top 10
American think tanks concentrating on
international affairs, just one was then
run by a woman. When CNN, Fox, and MSNBC-- so the range-- had
foreign policy segments, they chose male commentators
a remarkable 80% of the time. And so even though in recent
memory Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice,
Hillary Clinton have run the State
Department, we can't forget that
until 1971, women Foreign Service
Officers at State had to retire if
they got married. And only 9% of US ambassadors
have been women since the country's-- since
our country's founding. More often than not-- and
this remains true today-- the women ambassadors
are posted to countries considered less central
to US national security. No woman has yet
served as ambassador-- US ambassador to China,
to Russia, Israel, Turkey, or Afghanistan. And I think it's fair to say
the same basic story applies across government agencies, like
CIA and the Defense Department. I came to understand that
hiring men and women in roughly equal numbers at the
NSC really required pushing water uphill, slowing
down the hiring process at just the time that,
given the workload, you were inclined
to speed it up, and proactively
reaching out to women to urge them to throw
their hats in the ring, or trying to appeal to
them and to overcome the doubts that they have about
even taking jobs of this nature given some of the reputational
issues that also existed. Jim Clapper, President
Obama's Director of National Intelligence,
made the case for more proactive
hiring this way. He said, "Over my 53-plus years
in the intelligence business--" that's a lot of years-- "I've watched women rise
to leadership positions all around me. And having women
in leadership roles is more critical than people
on the outside would think. We have found that with almost
all the major intelligence failures we've had, diversity
of thought might have saved us," end quote. And speaking about the equally
troubling absence of people of color in the field
of national security or foreign policy, President
Obama's National Security Advisor, Susan Rice,
put it perfectly. "Our national security
agencies have not yet drawn fully on the strengths
of our great nation. In the halls of power, in the
faces of our national security leaders, America is still
not fully reflected." And that was before
the cabinet came to look like founding fathers. So fortunately for me, even
though there were far more men than women at the NSC,
as I've indicated, I rarely found myself the
only woman in the room. And there were all--
again, all these ways in which I think we found a
way to reinforce one another. And the culture did evolve,
importantly, over time. Things were very different when
I got to the United Nations, when I became President Obama's
second ambassador to the United Nations, where you
really often were the only woman in the room. So since World War II
when the UN was created, enshrining within
its founding charter the critical importance
of human rights and fundamental
freedoms, there has never been a woman Secretary-General. And the percentage of women
ambassadors representing the various member
states, which-- and this would just reflect the
dynamics within the countries that comprise the UN-- has never exceeded 25%. Now, I was really lucky,
because I didn't represent any old country at the UN. I represented the United
States, the country that hosts the UN on its soil. We are the largest
financial donor to the UN by leaps and bounds. We have the veto. One of five countries
at the UN have the veto. We bring our policy
initiatives there. As a result, I think
it's fair to say that over my time at the UN,
the salience of my Americanness was more relevant or
evident to other countries than me being a woman was. And so I think I suffered very
few of the kinds of slights that I know from my
colleagues, women colleagues, that they suffered. Madeleine Albright
liked to joke, quote, "It used to be that the
only way a woman could truly make her foreign policy views
felt was by marrying a diplomat and then pouring tea on an
offending ambassador's lap." By the time I assumed
my position in 2013, a trio of amazingly strong
women had served at the UN, representing the United States
before me, Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1981 to 1985, Albright herself,
'93 to '97 before she became our first woman
secretary of state, and Ambassador
Rice, 2009 to 2013. So when I got to New York,
I read the biographies by Jeane Kirkpatrick and
about Jeane Kirkpatrick and by Secretary
Albright herself. And I think when you read
biographies of women who've served in prior
generations, you really see how much has
changed for the better. And I'm just going to give you
a flavor of that here today. Jeane Kirkpatrick, raised
in a small town in Oklahoma, ducked out of an early
stint in government to raise her three sons
while she was competing her doctorate at Columbia. She was discovered in 1979--
that's the year I came to this country from Ireland-- after Dick Allen, Ronald
Reagan's foreign policy advisor in the presidential campaign,
gave Reagan an essay that she had written
in commentary, which you all probably
are familiar with, called "Dictatorships
and Double Standards." Reagan, who had just
announced that he was running for president, read the essay
on a flight from Washington to Los Angeles and called
Allen very excitedly when he got home. "What you gave me to read was
extraordinary," Reagan said. "Who is this guy,
Jeane Kirkpatrick?" Kirkpatrick was almost
always the only woman in the room at the
UN and in Washington. During her four years
in New York at the UN, she was one of just three
women ambassadors out of the then 157 UN member
states, three out of 157. She served with also a woman
ambassador from Liberia and from the Seychelles. The Soviet Union, just to give
you an indicator, has had, actually, 11 ambassadors
in their mission. The United States has five. Soviet Union had
11, none a woman. She later recalled how
people interacted with her or treated her. She said, quote,
"it rocked them. I think they just regarded
me as a very odd creature," end quote. Now, the Washington glass
ceiling she shattered is, in many ways, just
as important, if not more important. She was the first
woman in history to have a seat at the table
in the high-level debates. Now we'd call it the
Principals Committee. Then they had
another name for it. But basically, your
national security cabinet, first woman ever. Again, I was new to the
United States, an immigrant with my mother and
my younger brother. But a photo that really stuck in
my mind from when I was a kid-- I know, it's amazing-- was this one, and
seeing Kirkpatrick there among the suits at the
center of the shot. Now, soon after-- soon after
she was chosen UN ambassador, a friend of hers reported that
Secretary of State Alexander Haig had reacted to the news of
her appointment by exclaiming, "I don't know how
anybody expects that I will work with that bitch." Secretary Haig, who famously
craved the diplomatic limelight himself, accused Kirkpatrick
of being temperamental-- sound familiar?--
mentally and emotionally incapable of thinking clearly,
especially during the Falklands Crisis, when their
relationship came to a head. Even those who
respected Kirkpatrick-- of whom there were many at the
time-- treated her differently, I think, it's fair to say. In the spring of 1983, Chief
of Staff Mike Deaver told her, "Everyone notices
you have influence with President Reagan." When Kirkpatrick shrugged,
Deaver went on, "No, no, no. Everyone notices. He always listens
when you speak. He looks at you and
his eyes light up. Maybe it's because
you're a woman." Kirkpatrick shot
back, "Maybe it's because he's interested
in foreign policy." President Clinton appointed
Madeleine Albright to the UN ambassadorship
less than a decade later. By this time, she was
not the sole woman in the traditional
cabinet photo. For Albright, also,
sitting behind the placard in New York that said
United States of America had special resonance. She was a Czech
immigrant, but a refugee. Her refugee family had
come to this country. And she remains, to
this day, incredibly grateful to this country
for welcoming her in and very
outspoken about, now, the curbs on incoming
refugee flow. Albright married young,
three days after her college graduation, and took
the long road, 13 years, to completing her
doctorate at Georgetown while she raised
her three daughters. She was frustrated
that the skills she was honing as a
multi-tasking mother carried little weight in
the professional world. As she would later put
it, "Senior vice president for communications sounds
so much more important than 'put out school newsletter.'"
Albright did not hold a full-time job until
she was 39 years old. When I was nominated
to become UN ambassador and I went to see
Secretary Albright, she told me that when
she had been at the UN, she had convened a group
for women ambassadors. And then, when she was there-- again, there were more
countries in the world as well than when
Kirkpatrick had been there-- there were 183 countries. And only seven of
those countries were represented by women. So Albright branded
her group the G7. Not the group of seven,
the girls' seven. And they traded gossip. They shared family experiences. And they really, I
think importantly, became a cross-regional lobby
on behalf of women's issues, even managing to
get two women judges onto the bench of the new UN war
crimes tribunal, which was just being set up. Now, I had way more female
company when I got to New York in 2013. I was the one of 37 women
permanent representatives out of 193 countries, again,
more countries than in '93. But that's still
just 20% overall, which is quite
similar, actually, to our own Congress, the ratio. And again, the UN tends to
be reflective of how things are within national systems. Now, on the most
powerful UN body, which is the 15-member
UN Security Council, I had the chance in 2014 to
serve with four other women. There were five of us-- the United States, Nigeria,
Luxembourg, Jordan, and Lithuania. We were the largest
female contingent on the council in the
seven-decade history of the UN. And though we only
accounted-- we didn't all sit together, actually. This was a panel. But maybe we should have. Though we only accounted for
a third of the membership on the premiere UN body
responsible for making international law, deciding
on the use of force, sanctions, et cetera, the
excitement around the UN was palpable in this period
where we had the chance to serve together. Young women would pull
me aside in the restroom, in the ladies restroom,
to say how proud they were to see five women
duking it out in the usually male Security Council chamber. And the longer I served, though,
also apart from how it looked and the signal that that sent,
which I'll come back to-- the longer I served,
the more evidence I saw of the functional value,
as well, of this gender parity. Having more women
on the council, just simply put, changed the
nature of our deliberations. We weren't perfect at
listening to one another, but I think it's fair to say we
listened to one another more. With more women
colleagues on the council, we also talked more, as it
happened, about sexual violence and about the importance
of including women in peace processes, from which
they are so often shut out. Nonetheless, even
with us there-- and we were a formidable group. I mean, the character of
the individuals involved were very, very
strong in each case. Just even having that
presence didn't, of course, stop our some of
our male colleagues from saying completely crazy
things behind closed doors. On several occasions,
male ambassadors questioned whether
well-documented cases of rape as an atrocity
in war had occurred. And I'll just quote
you from one of them. "Why would the
soldiers have done this when they have their
wives to come home to?" one of my African
colleagues asked. "Where's the proof? If these rapes really
happened, any woman victim would want to talk about it. They wouldn't care if
security forces were present." So I asked-- this is
the advantage, again, of at least being in the
room where it happens. I asked, oh, are
you speaking from your vast personal experience
of having been raped and then being
asked what happened while security forces affiliated
with your rapist leered over you? Is that how you are an
authority on this matter? The Russian
ambassador, memorably-- it's become the stuff of
legend in the small circle that is New York, but criticized the
UN's Yemen envoy for spending too much of his precious time
on the ground talking to women. "Your job is to make peace and
that is a hard enough job," the Russian ambassador said. "Why are you wasting
your time having meetings with women who aren't even
involved in the conflict?" That's an important point. So let's spend all our time
with the men who are fueling the conflict and won't stop. In each of these
instances and many others, the heads of the women
ambassadors present and some of the male
ambassadors, of course, as well would snap to attention. And each of us would
fling our hand up in the air to seek the floor to
challenge what had been said. Unfortunately, in 2016, the
number of women ambassadors dwindled back down
to 1 out of 15. There she is. That's me. And it remained that way
until just a few weeks ago when Karen Pierce became
the first woman in history to represent the United
Kingdom at the United Nations, joining now Ambassador
Nikki Haley. In my years in government,
as I alluded to earlier, I developed a heightened
appreciation for symbols. And one of the most moving
photographs taken during the Obama presidency was this
one of Jacob Philadelphia-- this was 2009-- just tentatively reaching up
to just-- to feel, to see, to be sure, could it
really be the case that this African-American
man with hair just like this little
boy's was, in fact, President of the United States? So what we see matters
hugely, changes our sense of what's possible. And when I would sit in the open
chamber of the Security Council as the only woman
permanent representative, I would often see
the school tour groups that would come
into the UN in New York. And they're escorted
into the viewing gallery. They sit there. They watch 10, 15
minutes of the debate. And I just found
myself wondering, what must these children think? They look down at this famous
horseshoe where world history has sometimes been made. And is the ambition of these
girls altered by the sense that there's one
out of 15 people as a woman at this table,
and the boys' sense-- for both-- of what is normal
shaped again by that picture? So needless to say,
in the 21st century, it should not and
should never have been seen as normal for
women to have only one seat at that table or any table. So I am working on a
book about my experiences in government
provisionally titled The Education of an Idealist, a
title that will likely change, because why is it only idealists
who get educated, I ask you, but nonetheless, gives
you a sense of what I'm trying to track. But in part, because of all
that is going on around us now and the bravery of women
across so many domains, I am asking myself questions
that I haven't really asked before. Has my professional life been
impacted more by these issues than I recognized? Was I, at times, dismissed
or underestimated because of my gender? Have I myself blocked
out various dimensions of the problem, and
in so doing, failed to do as much as I should
have myself in the positions that I've had to
combat this phenomenon? And how can I equip
my young daughter to handle what
lies ahead for her? So I'm still wrestling with
these personal questions. And I don't have
great answers yet. But I have, for the
purposes of today, at least, tried to distill what
are the lessons for now, at least as I can offer them up. So here are a few ideas,
at least, humbly put, tentatively put. But first, I think women
have a wonderful opportunity and responsibility to have
the backs of other women. I tried to use my
perch at the UN to push for women's voices
to be heard around the world. Often, I was unsuccessful. But at times, we were able
to line the moons up in a way that I think mattered. One example is that I launched
a campaign called #FreeThe20, which was aimed at securing the
release of 20 women political prisoners around the world. These are voices of women
that were being silenced in Egypt, Ethiopia,
Venezuela, China, a whole bunch of countries. And here were the 20 women. I would hang-- each
day for 20 days, we hung a portrait of one of
the women and profiled them. And social media and the State
Department and the White House got behind it, as did
members of Congress. And I think, thanks to a lot of
advocacy, and particularly that by outside groups
who have nothing to do with the US
government-- but in the end, together, 16 of the 20
prisoners we profiled gained their freedom. The other thing I did was-- and, again, much of what
I did was ineffective. What I'm about to describe felt
like there was a power to it, but very, very hard
to know, certainly in the short term, but just
a simple thing that all of us have in our power
to do today, which is just while traveling
abroad as UN ambassador, just insisting on
every one of my trips that I would just
meet with young girls in difficult situations
and just talk to them about their aspirations. And most of these
girls, you can imagine, had never met a high-ranking
female official. In Mexico, I met with a group
of underprivileged girls in a soccer league,
played soccer with them. In Nigeria, I met with
a group of schoolgirls from Chibok, which many of you
know from the news who-- these were girls who had been
captured by Boko Haram, but then mercifully had
escaped in the early part of their captivity. In the war-ravaged north of Sri
Lanka, meeting with Buddhist and Muslim girls who
were learning how to live together again. And in Israel and the
Palestinian territories, sitting down with
honor students who dreamed of becoming
engineers, architects, and even a few politicians. So, I mean, the hurdles
that these girls faced were unimaginable. But again, the ferocity of their
determination and discipline left me and the
members of my team completely blown
away and inspired. We still have a
huge amount of work to do in ensuring
women and girls abroad and at home have the
confidence to pursue the ambitions that they
think up for themselves. I'll give you an American
statistic that's quite jarring. American men are
both more likely to see themselves as qualified
to run for political office and much more likely to receive
encouragement from family and friends to do so. A pair of studies-- one from 2001, one 2011--
found that men were almost 60% more likely than women
to describe themselves as very qualified to be a
candidate, even though the men and women surveyed were both
equally experienced in terms of fundraising, policy
knowledge, et cetera. A follow-on report that
focused on young people similarly found that
female college students are less likely than their male
peers to feel that they have what it takes to run for office. And that's, again, more recent. This self-doubt manifests
itself in a whole bunch of very subtle ways. A fascinating survey-- oh,
you can't actually see it-- of Americans age 15 to 24 was
released just two weeks ago. And it confirmed what
we have all been seeing. Young women
distinguished themselves as much more politically engaged
than their male counterparts in 2017. And that was on everything from
volunteering to donating money to attending demonstrations. At the same time, a much
higher percentage of women cited a lack of knowledge
about the issues or a fear of undue
criticism as explanations for why they decided not
to be politically active. As teachers,
parents, and mentors, we've got to somehow
find a way to continue to narrow and close, in the
end, this confidence gap. Second, if we want
to make change, we who share a
desire to see change must embrace politics
in all of its messiness. I don't know. That's sort of the
biggest realization I have on all national
security issues, and certainly on this issue,
anything related to gender. There's really no
obvious door number two. Politics, politics, politics. And here, again, some
good news, EMILY's List, which for more
than three decades has been tracking the
number of women who have come forward to run for office-- EMILY's List, as you know,
has existed for 32 years and it helps recruit and
elect pro-choice women. But it reported that in
2016, the 32-year-old record was shattered, that 920
women had come forward seeking information about
how to run for office. Now, in 2017, the year that
just closed out, the 920 was-- looks like the 19th century,
22,000 women reached out. So that just gives you a sense,
like that was the prior record. And that's captured in a lot of
what we read about, of course, in terms of women's engagement. Between 2016 and now,
the number of women running for congressional or
statewide offices has doubled. And in those crucial races
for control of the House, so far there are
389 women running, the most female
candidates ever seeking to become a US representative. And women are not only running. They are winning. In Virginia, 11 of the
14 women candidates for the House of Delegates
backed by EMILY's List won their races, 11 out of 14. Many of these women were
firsts for the Virginia House, the first Latina, the
first Asian-American, the first lesbian, and the
first transgender woman. Signing ceremony looks a
little different than often. But we must acknowledge, of
course, that change is slow. And incremental gains
never seem to be enough. At the current rate of
progress, without knowing, now, the outcome of 2018, where
so many more women are getting involved, but-- so putting that to one side. But it would, unless that
makes a major difference, take another 75 years to achieve
gender parity in Congress and 152 years for
state governors. Now, that's not what
it's going to take. It's going to take a
lot less than that. But that's if we
were to extrapolate on the basis of
where we are now. Shelly Simmons, a name
you might remember from the news of the
last couple months, tied for her Virginia seat. And she lost, then, if
you can call it that, because of the random
drawing to break the tie that went in her opponent's favor. And afterward, she said, "I'm
my usual, angry, pissed-off self about the situation. Next time, I'm not
going to lose." And it seems like it will
take that kind of resilience and determination to accelerate
those numbers and the pace of change. Third-- and I only have four-- I think those of us who have
been fortunate enough to obtain high-profile roles
as women leaders-- my own view is that
we could afford to be more open about the
doubts and the challenges that we face. Madeleine Albright I've always
really admired for doing this. She has often talked about being
the only woman at the table in policy debates and thinking--
and these are her words-- "OK, well, I don't
think I'll say that. It might sound stupid. And then some man says
it and everybody thinks it's completely brilliant. And you were so mad at yourself
for not saying something." And that's Madeleine. Across male-dominated
fields, women experience many of
the same dynamics. But we don't always
seek each other out to learn from one another. And I know that, while I
never would have been the one to create this Wednesday group
I told you about at the NSC, I'm so glad that
one of my colleagues had the insight to do so. The busier one is, the
less time one feels one has for such initiatives. But I think they offer
consolation and inspiration at once. We women are often the jugglers
if we happen to have kids. No amount of leaning in appears
to have changed the fact that we are the ones likely to
be orchestrating the carpool and making sure our kids
brush their teeth properly. Sorry, I'm sure there are
amazing male parents here. In my household, the
modernity has not yet struck on these matters. He's out of town, so I can-- I get away with this. But feel free to bring it
up the next time you see him at Harvard Law School. Some women perform
the miracle juggle. I mean, most women
perform the miracle juggle without
advertising it, somehow managing their jobs
or their home lives as if with their
left hands, making it look easy from the outside. I have been incredibly lucky
to have a lot of support for my juggle, including
my mother and my parents. But I've never found it
easy and have always-- or at least, since I've
been in public life, advertised those challenges
for what they're worth. The time I really
started doing that was when I had a grueling
confirmation hearing because of what I had written as an
activist and an academic. It was very difficult to
go before the US Senate and then have to
answer for everything I'd said and written
my entire life. So it was difficult.
And the gavel sounded. Finally, it was over. And I prepared for it for weeks. And my four-year-old
son jumped into my arms. I know. And he's such a ham. He was like, yay, I've been
waiting for this my whole life. And a good few--
you can't see it, but basically, a scrum
of reporters came and they start
snapping this photo. And it was published in
a good few newspapers. It's a lovely photo of my son. And it just captures
my relief, I think, at surviving my
confirmation hearing. But what amazed
me about this was I started getting notes from all
over the country, and even some from around the world, just
saying how heartened they were to see somebody attempting
a national security cabinet role with small children in tow. And again, I just didn't--
that wasn't my orientation. I didn't think in those
terms, and then began to be much more public
about some of the dimensions to my juggling. So this meant speaking about
the inelegance of my efforts to work and mother
at the same time. This was my approach, not the
one I recommend for everybody. So I might have mentioned
publicly several times how I breastfed my
daughter while on the phone with the UN
Secretary-General talking about a chemical
weapons attack in Syria. Or the way in which-- in order to explain my
absences to my boy, Declan, I taught him more about
Vladimir Putin and Crimea than is probably healthy
for a seven-year-old. But the point is,
every woman has her own way of managing
their very particular juggle and so too makes up her
own mind-- the same true with working dads, of course,
as well-- about how transparent to be about that challenge. My conscious
decision, particularly in the wake of the reaction
I had to this photo, was to overshare, which
may be a weakness of mine. Fourth and finally,
even amid the cruelty being perpetrated by our
current president and the desire many of us have to change
the whole world at once, I think figuring out how
to be good with bite-sized contributions and doing
what each of us can do, what is-- identifying
and pursuing what is in each of our power to do. It's about what is one's
specific difference. What is the specific
difference each of us can make? And it is going to be millions
of small contributions that ultimately produce the
kind of equality that we seek. And here, it was a
Martin Luther King-- I love Martin Luther King
quotes, constantly been quoting them my whole life. But I had never seen this quote,
but is now my favorite Martin Luther King quote, "Be a
bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a
highway, just be a trail. If you can't be
a sun, be a star, for it isn't by size
that you win or fail. Be the best at
whatever you are." And here, inspired a
little bit by a talk that Kathryn Sikkink
gave on Tuesday, I would point to the
simple act even of voting, which all citizens have it
within their power to do. And focusing
specifically on women, it is devastating to note that,
while women still generally vote more than men in the United
States, female turnout in 2016 was down when compared
to 2004, 2008, and 2012. Given the stakes
and the consequences that we're living
every day, that's something we have got to remedy. And that's with the chance
to elect even the first woman president in American history. We have to find a way to
rally our family and friends, having worked so hard
to secure for women a voice in American
political life, encouraging women
to raise that voice and insist that they be heard. In addition-- and
this is just because I feel like every talk that's
in any way about politics or public policy needs to
address this in some fashion. But I think part, again,
of our small contributions before we are able to
make the big ones relates to political polarization. Speaking here directly to
women, if we are mothers, we are talking
incessantly about our kids to other mothers and fathers. Now, in the Republic
of Cambridge, it may be that we don't--
there isn't a huge amount of diversity there. But in most communities,
it is still-- there is more plurality
in those communities than is reflected by
our electoral maps. And I think, again,
all of us, as people who are parts of
families, want our leaders to solve practical
problems for our families. So here, again, just
we can all do better at trying to listen
to one another and be prepared to change
our minds, something that gets harder and harder
given what is coming at us, trying to reclaim this
world of facts and truth and putting our minds to
the larger epistemological challenge of how
we go about that and focusing on what unites
us, which notwithstanding, again, the group of
people that appear to want to go in a
different direction, wanting security and
dignity for our families and our communities
really does-- it can unite the vast majority
of people in this country. And in the spirit of talking
about aspiring to breaking down some of the echo chambers in
our country and our culture, I would note that this national
reckoning that I've referred to and that is so much with
us in so many spheres right now was kicked
off by none other than Gretchen Carlson, a
longtime Fox News anchor who, for many years, hosted Fox
& Friends, Donald Trump's favorite TV show. And as a direct result
of Carlson's bravery in coming forward with her
stories of sexual harassment, Roger Ailes resigned
as president of Fox. This started a
domino effect that led to the dismissal of Bill
O'Reilly and top network executives. And today, Gretchen
Carlson is a major force behind pursuing bipartisan
legislation that is now pending before Congress,
which would invalidate unfair mandatory arbitration
clauses that allow employers to cover up patterns of
abuse by preventing employees from taking cases of
sexual harassment to court. I would like to close and really
look forward to the discussion. These are difficult
times, to say the least. But America's history-- I need that back. I need that back. Can I have that back? Thank you. America's history is, of course,
filled with difficult times. And women have always been
among the first to rise. At the risk, again, of
pandering at Radcliffe, the historian Gerda
Lerner once counseled, "Always ask, what
did the women do while the men were doing
what the textbook tells us was important?" And here, just again in the
realm of inspiring historical tidbits, 4,500 women
launched campaigns for office before the ratification of
the 19th Amendment in 1920. And somewhat amazingly, given
the times, more than 3,000 won those races. And Susanna Salter, who was
the first woman ever elected mayor in the US, was put
on the ballot in Kansas by a group of men who thought
it would be a hilarious joke until she won 2/3 of the votes. So we think we have it bad. Women were a driving
force in the movement to abolish slavery,
and a century later, in the civil rights movement. We remember the
names, of course, of Rosa Parks and Fannie
Lou Hamer, Sojourner Truth. But women whose
names never appeared in bold print also helped
carry these movements, women like Alabama's
Jo Ann Robinson, who mimeographed 35,000 leaflets
the night of Rosa Parks' arrest to publicize the
first bus boycott. And of course, when it came
to fighting for equal pay, it was a woman,
Lilly Ledbetter, who never gave up, even
when the Supreme Court sided against her. She appealed all the
way to President Obama, who signed the Lilly Ledbetter
Fair Pay Act in 2009, helping restore
protections for women against pay discrimination. It is clear that women
and men must unite behind the cause of equality. It has been a year since the
incredible women's marches. And we've just had the
anniversary marches. My favorite sign was one
hoisted by a middle-aged man. [LAUGHTER] I think that kind
of says it all. "Not usually a sign
guy, but geez." So influenced by Sign Guy,
who I hope to meet someday, it does seem the right time
to ask, what are each of us normally not that these times
suddenly require us to be? And little girls like this
one are counting on us to figure that out. So thank you. That's my daughter. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. - Is it time? - Yeah. - Hi. Thank you. - Please, yeah, if you
could just introduce yourself, maybe, and-- - Sure. My name is Tanya [INAUDIBLE]. I'm a Harvard
Radcliffe graduate, a concert pianist with
interest in many disciplines. And I try to speak
up in my hometown about issues, irregularities,
process matters, et cetera. So I am going to also ask
about a foreign policy question, which is
the non-recognition of the Armenian Genocide. I do happen to be Armenian,
but pretend I am Norwegian. I grew up in Turkey, so
I have made my own peace with the issue. But I am concerned. I know that it can't be an
easy matter in foreign policy because Turkey is
a military ally and they don't want
1915 stuff recognized. What do you think? Wouldn't it be better
if genocides were all recognized so that,
A, they don't repeat, B, we call them genocide
as they happen today, like the Rohingya? And maybe it explains
more of what's going on in the
Middle East today. Thank you. - Thank you very much. I agree with you. I think genocide
should be recognized. I think when governments
or people or institutions are put in a position
where they have to contort and wiggle around and
come up with euphemisms, I think therein madness lies. And we, as your question-- you're polite in the way
you pose your question, but as your question suggests,
we promised we were going to recognize the Armenian
Genocide and we didn't. And if you ask me why,
fundamentally, the president initially-- the right year to
do it would have been 2009. We had promised on the
campaign we'd just come off, rip the Band-Aid off, and
just say to President Erdogan, sorry, I made this commitment
and I keep my commitments. I mean, we were really
motivated as an administration by the set of things that
we had promised to do. But there was-- you
might remember-- back in 2009, a nascent normalization
process between Armenia and Turkey. And the president was convinced
that doing so would potentially set back that in-the-region
reckoning among the-- between the parties. To me, it seemed more like
a ploy on the part of Turkey to get through April 24,
2009, the-- our first Armenian Genocide Remembrance
Day occasion, where we should have recognized. And I think that
history bore that out, that it ended up being not
a normalization process to which there was real
sincerity to make progress. Then the other occasion-- of course, we could have done
it any year, but just the way government works, the
other bite at the apple was really on the
100th anniversary when Pope Francis recognized and
many countries and parliaments around the world. And there-- again, this
isn't by way of excuse. But just to give you a
sense of the context, we were just getting
access to Turkish bases to fight against ISIS. And there was a
fear that Erdogan, given his erratic way of
dealing with everything and his anti-Americanism and
so forth, would just-- would actually sooner
have ISIS caliphate survive than allow Americans
to use these bases in the wake of the genocide recognition. So this is why they pay-- President Obama didn't really
pay them the big bucks. But these are
really tough calls. But I think I come back
to your first premise. It's just, in general-- it will serve you well
over time if you-- if we as a government
and if we as people-- if we tell the truth. Yep. - Yes, hi, my-- [CLEARS THROAT] Sorry, I have a sore throat. My name is Ann Eldridge. And I wanted to ask a question
about relationships between men and women in the
diplomatic service and in national
security in general. I happen to have a classmate-- class of 1957-- who
is a retired diplomat. And she was married to
a classmate who was also a diplomat and served-- they both served in
many areas of the world. And actually, her career--
starting out in the 1960s doing this-- is just replete with
the kinds of challenges that you described, including
being told that, well, he has this position and we
thought you were coming along to be his secretary. But I happened to be reading
her memoir, which just came out this year, just at the time
that Vice President Pence was talking about how it
is impossible to get into the elevator with a
woman who is not Mother. And the situations that you
describe in which men so vastly outnumber women and
women have to face situations where they will be the
only woman in a context, and then adding onto that,
the uneasiness that is now pervading the whole question
of male-female relationships-- what if I say this? What if I do that? I just wonder if
you could comment on strategies that can address
those kinds of challenges. - Your answer's probably-- and the answer of
people here would be better than mine,
maybe people who have reflected on this more. I think the
sensitization by virtue of the public conversation
is already a step. And I think that, right now, if
you take just one institution which is where the
diplomatic corps lives, it would have been great if
Secretary Tillerson, as part of this conversation,
had come out-- He's so focused on the State
Department and the building and the positions and
the Foreign Service, but to make this a feature
of that, which I think is way too inward-looking. I think he's way too
inward-looking generally. I wish he'd tell us what
wars he wants to end and problems he wants
to solve in the world. But since he's not
that guy, at least if he's going to
deal with bureaucracy and make that his
passion, this is something that you can deal with
incentives and disincentives and structures and airings. But it's very hard
to do that when Donald Trump is your president. And so that's why when
it comes to, at least, the diplomatic world,
even though it feels like you can have a conversation
hived off from politics, it's about getting
rid of people who aren't dedicated to figuring
out how to manage this issue. It really is about-- and I think-- there have
been interesting writings. Jake Sullivan, who was
Secretary Clinton's policy guy in the campaign is one
of the most impressive people I met in my eight
years in government. He came out in the wake of some
of the kinds of disclosures that I referenced today and
just talked about himself. Now, I would see him
as in the upper 1% of 1% of enlightened,
progressive men that I came across
in government. And there are many, but
I mean really top tier. And yet, he was the one-- he
writes a long piece saying, here are all the ways
in which I failed, because it isn't enough just to
be progressive and then neutral when that culture, which is
so subtle and hard to break through in, exists around me. And so here's a list
of the kinds of things I wish I had done
as a progressive guy while I was in a
position of power. He was Secretary Clinton's
deputy chief of staff and then was on the campaign. So I refer you to that article. I mean, I think we have
to change our leadership. And then our leadership
needs to find a way to be more proactive. But one of the reasons
I mention all the feeder information about think tanks
and media and panels and-- that in this world of
diplomacy, it really would make a difference
if we started having an equal number of
people doing national security PhDs at the Kennedy
School, and if we started also internalizing
in our hiring the kinds of different
decisions women have to make at different
parts in their career and then make it easier
for them to hop back in if they've taken
time out, let's say, to have a baby or something. Anyway, so there's
a lot one can say. But I think the first
thing we have to do is just-- it's back to
politics, unfortunately. - Jay [? Gleason. ?] You're
right that it would be nice if Secretary Tillerson
would tell us how he wants to end the war in
Libya, which Barack Obama has called the worst mistake
of his presidency. You and Susan Rice and
the woman that you once referred to as a
monster, Hillary Clinton, were leading advocates
for that assault on Libya, whereas at the same time, men
in the cabinet, like Bob Gates and Tom Donilon and
then John Brennan were very much reluctant to take
on that type of intervention. So I can't help but
wonder whether women are becoming worse warmongers
and cold-blooded killers than men are. - Well the number of factual
inaccuracies that are implicit or that were stated
in your question do make me question whether
you were in the room with all this vivid detail about
who was on what side because much of what's
been written is inaccurate. But let me talk about
the intervention in Libya, which seems
to be the-- if I gather, the focus of your question. So in Libya, we
had a circumstance that we were
confronted with, which is that you had people who had
risen up against a dictator who was threatening to hunt the
people down like cockroaches, who had turned its sights
on Benghazi, which was where the revolution had started,
and where tens of thousands of peaceful protesters
were gathering every night in the main square. The Arab League called-- had a meeting, an
unprecedented meeting, where it expelled Libya
from the Arab League and called for the world,
the international community to use all necessary means
to protect civilians. Then the British and the
French proposed a no-fly zone. Gaddafi-- we don't need to-- Gaddafi wasn't using his
planes to carry out atrocities. All the evidence
we had was that it was his militia on the ground
who were hunting people down. And a no-fly zone basically
would not be effective. So we went to the United
Nations, which other than 9/11, basically had not
authorized the use of force to protect civilians in
more than two decades. And amazingly, the
UN Security Council, the arbiter of
international law, authorizes the use of
all necessary measures to protect civilians,
partly because they knew what Gaddafi was capable
of and what he was explicitly stating he was going to do. So the president then joined
with a coalition of countries in order to carry out
the intervention called for by the Arab League, by
the UN Security Council, and by the Libyan resistance. As it happened, in the
wake of the intervention, one of the things that the
same people had been calling for intervention were
absolutely adamant about was no foreign
presence, no foreign troops, no foreign police, no nothing. And in the wake of
what was initially a very beautiful time where
independent media flowered, civil society, women's
organizations, and the scrum of politics turned very
tribal, very messy, and with a division--
a profound division within the society between
Islamists and a more secular model. And Libya's in a terrible
state today and people are suffering the
consequences of what amounts to a civil war, a
low-grade civil war with ISIS also now at the foothold. I think the challenge--
and I'm reckoning with this along with
everything else-- is knowing what we
knew on the front end. All we knew was what we knew. And we knew also-- there are other
people in line also who are going to want to speak. But in the wake of
800,000 people getting killed in Rwanda, given
how explicit Gaddafi was. And given what I really
do believe to be the case, which is had we not-- what you would
have, I believe, is the massacre, which would
have been pretty ugly. But no one will know. It's a counterfactual. I have no idea how bad
it would have been. Maybe it would have
been better than Gaddafi himself was saying
he wanted to make it. And you would not have Libya
of the pre-revolution Libya. It's not like you'd have
a stable Libya today. Look at Syria. There's an example
of no intervention. And is that a stable place
where those kinds of divisions-- - All kinds of
intervention in Syria. - I'm sorry? - There's all kinds
of intervention in Syria, direct and proxy. In the UNSC 1973 did not
call for regime change. You can't cite anywhere
where it said regime change. The AU-- - But for all neccessary
measures to protect civilians. - The AU-- - OK, I think I've given
you the best answer I can. - --and the Arab league did
not call for regime change. - We're good. All right. Thanks for coming. Hope you enjoyed it. - Hi, I'm Robert Cooper. I love that photo of all
the male Secretaries-General of the UN. And I wondered if you have any
comment on the last selection process where there were several
qualified women candidates. My personal favorite,
since I'm from New Zealand, would've been Helen Clark. But there were
several candidates. I wonder if you have any
insights on that process. - I have big insights,
because the United States-- fortunately for
the United States-- gets to be very central to it. And within that process, the 15
members of the Security Council choose the successor
to Ban Ki-moon, chose the successor
to Ban Ki-moon. And because the five
permanent members have a veto, well, ultimately, the United
States has more than 1/15, probably, of influence
in all of this. So this process, for
the very first time, was public and transparent. And for the first
time, the candidates for Secretary-General had to
perform and answer questions before the broader membership
of the General Assembly, which I will say I did not
think would necessarily-- I thought it was the right
thing to do, of course, in terms of legitimacy and
broader ownership, but I didn't
necessarily think it would produce a better outcome. I thought there'd be a fair
amount of grandstanding and-- but it really was-- it really changed the dynamic. And it meant that, among
the-- and I forget now-- I think it was 11
candidates we had, more women competed this time-- I think five or six
women competed-- than all the prior races for all
the other secretary generalship combined. So that was the other thing
about making it public and having an emphasis on having
a woman Secretary-General. There was a group of countries
that was constituted called the Friends of a Woman
Secretary-General, and really banging the drum
about the importance of having a lot of women candidates and-- with the hope that
we would-- we, the 15, and specifically
the five permanent, would end up with a
woman Secretary-General. So these public
debates meant that each of these candidates, including
Helen Clark-- everybody performed. And weirdly, countries as
diverse as Saudi Arabia, France, Togo, Thailand-- they all came out
of those sessions believing that Guterres
was heads and shoulders-- or heads and tails,
however you say it-- above the rest in terms
of his qualification. He's a former prime
minister and former head of the UN Refugee Agency. One of the interesting
things was the main thing he had to answer for, he
was very explicit about it-- he's like, I'm not a woman. And I think, basically,
if I weren't running, I would think that there should
be a woman Secretary-General. But here's what I've done for
women throughout my career. And half his cabinet when he
was prime minister was women. All of his senior-- not all. I think it was a slim majority
of his senior appointments when he was head of the
Refugee Agency were women. So he had an account, not
just on appointments, but also on policies about what
he had done for women. And in the end, while
the United States had-- there were more
than one candidate that we would have supported
as Secretary-General, Guterres was the only one
that we could get all five of those countries
to agree upon. So a couple of the other women-- and I'm not going to out my
colleagues on the Security Council. But a couple of
the other women who we thought were
very compelling were voted against by permanent
members, which basically-- so they're [? doomed. ?]
Now, you could say, well, does this mean only
the guys are going to be the consensus candidates? Because these guys-- I was one of 15-- these
guys casting the ballots. I think in this
case what shocked me is that Russia was prepared
to live with Guterres, somebody who had a record of pushing
for human rights and women's rights, very-- just a very
progressive politician. But the fact that we actually
had the broader pool and it felt like a level-- I mean, given the record I've
describe, this is hard to say. But it felt like
people were being judged on the basis of how
they, for instance, answered questions about the
Libya intervention or answered questions about-- they weren't asked about
the Armenian Genocide. People had to perform and
show their capabilities and lay out a program for
what they were going to do. And it has to be said, Guterres
is the one now who's going to-- the Secretary-General is the one
who's going have to deal with this-- the Guardian expose
and all the allegations of abuse and harassment. But he has also just announced
that, for the first time, the senior appointments within
the UN are completely 50/50. I think it's-- where's Adam? Is it 50-50 or a little more-- yeah, basically even a
majority, now, of women. Ban Ki-moon was very
outspoken on these issues. But if you look at the
gap between the words and the actual appointments,
there's a big gap. So that's an example
of a campaign promise that Guterres has already
kept within a year of arriving in the job. - Hi, first off, I
think it's an honor. I didn't think I'd ever
be asking you a question. I admire you so much. So my question-- [APPLAUSE] - Thank you. - I just want to say that-- and I've read your first book
during my time in undergrad. I focused a lot on
the Syrian crisis. But my question is about Syria,
specifically President Assad, who is a war criminal. My question is, will we
ever be able to hold him accountable for these attacks? And there's now recent reports
that there's other chemical attacks happening in eastern-- is it Ghouta? - Ghouta, yeah. - Those questions that-- so really, my question
there is, will there ever be a solution there? This conflict
continues to happen and we're talking
about fighting ISIL. But you will not
ultimately, in my opinion, defeat ISIL until you
solve the Assad problem. So that's my question. - Thank you, [INAUDIBLE]. - But it's such an
honor to be here. So thank you. - Thank you very much, sir. Thank you. Let me take your question,
though, in two parts, because the first
question was on Assad's personal accountability,
and then the second, more the structural question
about whether the regime and-- so first, on accountability,
I mean, right now, he's operating with a sense of--
and has been for some time-- operating with a sense
of great impunity. Fundamentally, the economic
sanctions that have been put in place, the tools in
the toolbox that are about de-legitimation and stigma-- those just-- those have
had no impact on him. Now, whether military force-- taking to heart the point that
the earlier question addressed, which is military force
is a very uncertain tool. And you can't deal with
these underlying fissures and cleavages in the society. So whether that would have made
a difference, we don't know. And that's, again,
something I'm going to have to grapple with in
the book that I'm writing and President Obama himself is
grappling with in the memoir that he's writing. But we tried-- I tried, when I was
ambassador, to bring an international criminal
court referral to the Security Council, because that's
when-- since Assad's not going to refer himself, and because
Syria is not a state party, the court has no
jurisdiction to say, hey, there's a guy running a country
who's killing his people and gassing these people. So I tried that
and Russia vetoed it, one of a half-dozen
vetoes that Russia extended on Syria while I
was at the Security Council. And so it's tempting, in
the wake of that, to think, he's got Russia and
Iran behind him. He's winning on the battlefield. Military force is not going to
be employed, which is the one, maybe, coercive tool
that hasn't been tried. Maybe it could
make a difference. And so this guy is-- whatever, home free. There's not a lot
of history that cuts in that
direction, which isn't to say that tomorrow
there's going to be some big turn
of fortune for him. My first career, as I
mentioned, was in the Balkans. And if you had told me
when I left to come here to go to law school here
that Slobodan Milosevic would end up in prison by the
International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, or Ratko Mladic,
who just seemed invulnerable in very similar ways-- and again, very different
set of circumstances. NATO did get involved on
the ground in Yugoslavia. That made a big difference. But what tends to happen,
even in countries where you don't have something like
you had in the Balkans, is just the infighting
and the rivalries within the administration itself
combined with what we have now, which we didn't have
initially back then, which is the documentation and
the preservation of evidence, , means that it is less likely
to be a foreign plucking or imposition of something and
more likely to be some kind of internal fissure
at some point. But that's not very
satisfying to people who are-- have been victims. 400,000, 500,000 people
have been killed, it looks like, in Syria, as
you say, the gas attacks, this genie out of the
bottle that we thought was squarely sealed in there
from the time of Saddam Hussein. So the larger
question before one could even imagine this
infighting or Assad meeting his political demise and
then potentially getting extradited to face
justice is the question of a political solution to
what's happening in Syria. And Liz mentioned
The Final Year, this movie that has just come
out about Obama's last year where Obama and his team granted
almost full access, basically, to a team of filmmakers. And one of the things
that's captured in the film that's kind of the
heart of the film is Syria. And the efforts that
Secretary Kerry made are-- because it only
captures the final year, it only shows him
in the final year to get Russia, Iran, the
Europeans, the Arabs, the Gulf Arabs, everybody
under the same tent to try to put enough
pressure on the opposition and on the regime. And when you see this
film, I mean, there are-- if nothing else, it'll just
make you love John Kerry. You see him, at times,
staggering up the stairs, just so exhausted because he's
been going from a Yemen meeting to a Paris climate meeting,
Cuba normalization, Syria. And again, it's A for effort. But none of us-- we didn't get the
results that we wanted. And yet, the one way
I know we will not have a solution for Syria is for
none of that effort to occur. And that's the world
we're in now, where-- the way international
diplomacy works for now, before China begins
to flex its muscles, as it will at some
point in these areas-- but it's like a pickup-- it's like pickup basketball. Someone is picking people and
pulling them into the tent and putting forward
political agreements. We have a military, a tactical
approach to defeating ISIS. As you said, we have
nothing, as the United States or the broader
international community, aimed at getting at the
underlying causes of ISIS. And that just has to change. And I'm hopeful-- the
only hope I have is that our military, which has
performed so ably in achieving this very important
tactical victory of ending the caliphate, in
my experience-- and the same Chairman
of the Joint Staff today was the one that we had,
Joe Dunford, who's superb. But in my experience
in the situation we're in, whether on Libya
or Syria or anything else, it's the military saying,
where's the governance? How are we going to
deal with the underlying causes of why people went
into ISIS in the first place? Because they know
it's just whack-a-mole with military force alone. And so maybe that's
the-- the tail will wag the dog eventually and we'll
start to get some diplomacy out of this administration. - --ask their questions because
we're going to have to-- - No problem. - Just hear their
questions and then-- - Yeah, I'll take
all your questions and I'll write down
my yes/no answers. - Hi, Liam deClive-Lowe,
aspiring political organizer and undergraduate student
here at the Harvard Extension School. In your presentation, you
talked about this surge in candidates, especially
women candidates, who are now running for office. And obviously, in
those elections, foreign policy's an
enormously complex issue that has a huge impact on
the way that people vote. So based on your
experience, what is your advice to this
new slew of candidates about how to talk about foreign
policy on the campaign trail? And number two, do
you have any plans to join those ranks of
candidates as one yourself, potentially, in the future? - I did until that
guy scared me off. I thought I-- - My name's [INAUDIBLE]. I'm a woman in tech. And the work that
you're doing in terms of emphasizing the importance
of women in various roles is super critical. You've been personally a
great role model for me, whether you meant it or not. So it's great to be here. My question for you
is about the comment you made at the end regarding
truth and facts, which has been such a challenge for us. I do think it's the biggest
risk for democracy for us. What are your thoughts
regarding the responsibility that tech companies have? And what's the role
of government in that? Thank you so much. - Thank you very much. - Hi, thank you. My name is Guy. I'm a genocide
survivor from Darfur. Before coming to America,
I lived in Israel also for five years. And then I'm currently an asylum
seeker in the United States. Thank you for your
magnificent contribution to this global society. My question is, America has
contributed to the world so much, but we still
have our problems. I have some
classmates that I ask. And your thoughts on
America's contribution to the global society makes
them a little bit uncomfortable because they feel like
they have given so much. What is a better way
that we can do and stop all these crises that are
happening outside America? And also, where America stands
today, and the crises that are happening in
Libya, the slave trade and torture
that is happening-- I don't know if you saw it. Yesterday it was on the news. I don't want to
take too much time. But for also the
international community-- the International
Criminal Court, the ICC, has issued a
warrant for arrest-- to arrest al-Bashir,
the president of Sudan. But these guys are still
moving from country to country. Who is responsible
in implementing the court order of the ICC? Thank you. Thank you so much. Hi, I'm Hans Schattle. I teach in the political
science department at Yonsei University
in Seoul, South Korea. But New England's my
home, so it's really nice to see you here in person. I followed your
career trajectory back in the early 1990s. I was working as a news
reporter locally at the time here in Massachusetts. And it was really something
to see your dispatches in the Boston Globe during the
Bosnian War, and of course, everything that's followed. One of my big frustrations
in international relations is that we talk so much
about balance of power, and understandably so, but
we give correspondingly little airtime to the idea
of balancing responsibility. So I'm wondering, in your years
in government, and especially at the United Nations
in the last few years, did you come away from that
time with any new insights that could inspire us a little bit
about how we might think more comprehensively,
maybe holistically, about how to manage
responsibilities on issues, global warming,
migrants, refugees? We could, of course, talk
about R2P and the difficulty in rehabilitating that
concept after Libya. I mean, IR now is so much
bigger than just diplomacy, foreign ministries. We have corporations. Look at Davos this week, NGOs,
schools and universities, churches, everyday
citizens on Twitter. And There's so much out
there and I feel as if there's a lot of work
in the field that's still ahead of us in terms
of consolidating our thinking about how
we can solve problems more effectively that
transcend nation states. And of course, the UN is our-- it's the best venue we've
got, but it only goes so far. So any thoughts on that
would be really great. Great. Thank you. Great, OK. Wonderful. Thank you all. And thanks for staying
through all of this. It's OK if you
have to leave, too. So first, for the aspiring
political organizer-- Liam, I think you
said your name was-- we learned yesterday
at Radcliffe, through-- or two days ago
at Radcliffe that only 24% of eligible Harvard students
had voted in the midterm election in 2014. Aspiring political organizer,
there's a task for you. Why don't we all chip
in and figure out how we can get that up just
way, way higher, as something we can do in the here and now? But your question was about how
to talk about foreign policy. And I guess I would
acknowledge that we have-- we, the Obama administration,
did not crack that code, it's fair to say. The fact that we now
have not only the Trump base with "America
First" and this kind of discredited
political ideology that has lived within our
political ecosystem for more than a hundred years, but the
fact that that is now governing and that we're pulling out
of the kinds of things that put my world view to
one side, but just as a matter of
pragmatism, are needed, whether on climate or
on terrorism, alienating our allies or
insulting our allies, and thus really
jeopardizing our ability to call on them
when we need them, whether in the context of
international framework or even just bilaterally. So the fact that it's on
the left and the right-- and I'm not a believer
in false equivalence, because only one party
is governing and doing these things. But the left wing of
the Democratic Party is not very enthusiastic about-- or some of them,
anyway, are not very enthusiastic about the
kinds of investments in our national security,
whether in the form of our military or our
diplomacy or in terms of international engagements. And so this-- these
wings are very different. And one has a much
more inclusive model and doesn't have the
xenophobia and racism or any of that stuff. But in terms of the
belief of the balance between the domestic
enterprise and all that is left to be done here
at home and what we do abroad, there ends up being an overlap,
at times, in prescription. So that worries me a lot. And on communications,
I've talked to some of my favorite members
of Congress about this. We have to find a way
to talk about climate that feels relevant to
people's lives here. And it won't be by talking
about the Paris Agreement. And some people ask me
sometimes about my book and is there a thesis
undergirding it. And the only thing I can
tell you is I will not-- the words "liberal
international order" will not appear in my book. I aspire in telling
stories to reach people. Yes, that is my
unconcealed worldview, is that we have to invest
in our common security and our common humanity. But I've got to
find a way and we've got to find a way
to communicate that in a manner that's accessible
beyond our like-minded cohort. So I don't have a great answer. But I think this question
of how to communicate, how to talk about foreign
policy is really important. And we went through
this on Ebola. One thing President
Obama did, which I really admired
at the time, but I think has to be
supplemented, is people were in full-on panic in
this country about Ebola. You remember when patient
Duncan died in Texas and some of the
nurses got infected. And the polling was horrific,
even in democratic districts, of people wanting
to close our doors and not even let health workers
come back into this country or to quarantine them
when they came back in. And this was at a time
where more Americans had married Kardashians than
had died of Ebola, right? And so President
Obama didn't say what I just said, which would-- of course, you're not going to-- I went to West Africa in the
middle of the Ebola crisis. I was scared. I mean, fear is-- it's a legitimate thing
that one can feel. But how to meet people
where they are and-- if you just, whether on
terrorism, refugees, Ebola, climate-- if you just cite
statistics for people, a lot of people,
that's good enough. But there's a group that
aren't-- the Trump base, but of people who
can be convinced, but whom we have not
brought into the fold, for whom statistics and just
the facts aren't meeting them viscerally where they are when
they are feeling those fears, which of course
are stoked, then, by people who shouldn't
be-- who should know better. In terms of tech companies, let
me-- let me just acknowledge, I think, the importance of the
question in the following way. People ask us about the
Russia interference, which I'm surprised
I haven't been asked about, and with good reason. And they ask, should
we have done more? And should Obama have come out
and not just the intelligence agencies before the election? And all the rest and-- we're all going to be asking
ourselves questions about what we might have done differently. But one thing I just want
to convey is when we-- so cyber security and cyber
threats by foreign nations is something that we have
developed over the last decade, plus an infrastructure within
the US national security establishment to deal with,
Department of Justice, Department of Homeland
Security, Defense Department, intelligence in terms
of who's doing what. When it comes to
fake news and ad buys and your-- the
de-centralized world of your existence and
other citizens' existence, whether here or
anywhere else, there's no obvious government lever. And that's why this
conversation that's happening in Silicon Valley, as
unsatisfying as I have found it up to this point, really
is a conversation that should have been happening
four or five years ago. And we should have
done everything in our power-- we should
have done more to try to catalyze that conversation. But fundamentally, it's going to
be on that community of people to make things happen. And then I just merged
the last two questions because [? Gees' ?] question was
on how to stop crises and share burdens better, and then
the other was on balance of responsibility,
which I think also is another version
of burden-sharing. Part of the answer to the
first question about how you sell foreign
policy in a broader way will entail being able
to better describe what the international
order is buying us. And Donald Trump has had this
worldview throughout his life. He has not changed at all. He feels like we are
getting ripped off. And he has found something,
again, in his base, but also in others
who have supported him and now may have--
maybe have melted away. But we need to
show-- for instance, in my world of UN peacekeeping,
everybody focuses on the fact that it's a $8.5 billion budget
for UN peacekeepers, 100,000 UN peacekeepers in the world,
and we pay 28% of that. They don't focus on
the fact that 72% is paid for by other countries. And moreover, the troops who
actually are peacekeepers, who are risking their lives and
dying at record rates almost never come from
the United States. We have a tiny
percentage of that. Climate, I think we
made good headway. But responsibility is something
you hear a lot from the biggest emitters, from China and India. And their conception
of responsibility is historical, which
is really important. If you're them, you're
like, wait a minute. How can we just start
caring about climate when we are now needing coal
in order to develop and deal with our growing populations? And I think what we
succeeded in doing, partly by leveraging the
relationships that Obama had built with Xi and with Modi,
is for the first time now we have a language about
responsibility that is lateral and in the present about
emissions as being what dictates your responsibility. But we still have to
acknowledge the historical and the disparities
and so forth there. So I think a lot of creative
thinking needs to be done. And the questions that
emphasize language and framing are right because we
have to do better. If we are going to go
forward and actually be able to execute a worldview
that is rooted in the sense that we are connected and
that it is in our interests, also, to look out for others,
whether at home or abroad, we're going to
have to sell that. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING]
