The Dismantling of the State Department - Ronan Farrow

[Applause] [Music] thank you for coming everybody are we on here can you hear me thank you thank you for supporting this book that I wasted years I'm gonna I'm gonna introduce you I'll shut up I got to do my ad welcome everyone I'm Rick McArthur the publisher of Harper's Magazine and the proud part owner of book culture on Columbus which is the co-sponsor of tonight's event and America's most radically independent bookstore but before we get started how many of you have not yet visited the store okay I asked I asked because this church and the surrounding two block radius are an Amazon free zone and we depend on your patronage to keep independent book selling alive in New York and on our beloved Upper West Side you've already bought your copy of war on peace but we need you to keep buying books from book culture if you want us to continue sponsoring talks interviews and community gatherings like this one Amazon is a culture killer a neighborhood killer a retail store killer and I urge you to separate Donald Trump's attacks on Jeff Bezos from the ugly reality of mr. B's OSes approach to the book business Jeff Bezos is a ruthless monopolist with about as much interest in the health of authors and book publishers as well Donald Trump by the way book culture on Columbus is between 81st and 82nd and we're open until 10:00 p.m. yeah now it's my great pleasure to introduce Ronan Farrow fresh from his pillowed surprise for public service reporting to talk about his very important new book war on peace the end of the end of diplomacy and the decline of American influence I am also delighted to introduce James Hogue the former editor of foreign affairs magazine and a very important person in my life we're fortunate to have Jim interview Ronan tonight because of his expertise in foreign policy but also because he's an exemplar of the sort of tough unflinching quality journalism that is rapidly disappearing in the age of Google and Facebook I'm a I'm a lucky graduate of what I call the Jim Hogg school of journalism I was a reporter for the Chicago sun-times when Jim was editor-in-chief and then publisher and much of what I know about journalistic integrity as it applies to both reporters and publishers I learned from Jim now we're gonna leave time for questions from the audience we got started 15 minutes late so we'll go till 8:15 so around 8 o'clock this is in the interest of efficiency we'd like you to write down on the index cards that were given out to you when you checked in the questions that you might want to ask raise your hand if you need one now you are not limited to diplomacy in the State Department feel free to ask about Harvey Weinstein and workplace sexual harassment but I hope you'll direct most of your questions to the arguments in Ronan's book which is a detailed and multi-layered text that deserves a close reading it is not a coincidence that Ronan is published by WW Norton one of our last great independent book companies Jim thanks so much pleasure to be with you thank you for doing this you're also in the book by the way which I hope we get to oh yes he shows up in a particularly funny cameo in the book I'll save that for later no ask for Harvey Weinstein that's a subject I know less about than the one we're gonna talk about tonight so I'll mention him only once and I'll mention them mainly because our author tonight won his Pulitzer Prize for an extraordinary set of essays about Harvey Weinstein and his sexual abuses and his expensive cover-ups and it literally led to triggering many other people who otherwise might not have spoken up of having done so and really the meat to move upward if you want got its viral start on the basis of some great deal of the work that Ronan did but tonight we're going to talk about another part of Roeder's life he's a man of many parts he is not only a very effective investigative reporter he's a lawyer and he was for a period of time a diplomat in the State Department and an aide in international aid at the United Nations so he got many different directions what he's written here from the basis of his very enterprising life that he's led is a look at America's role in the world how it is being transformed and why we all ought to be very careful and worried if it continues along the paths it's on right now in essence it is that American foreign policy American statecraft if you will has been to a great extent taken out of the hands of civilians diplomats and such and put in the hands of the military now we have some fine men and militaries and buying women and they do a terrific job but if I think you will see as we go along tonight when you mesh the two completely you lose a very important part of how you're going to play a role you may end up having to be militarized and notarizing yourself apart much too early and in in the in the way events are unfolding now it's not a new experience this has been going on for some time and Ronen documents this in the book but in the 15 months or so of the Trump administration there has been a dramatic increase in what you might call the militarization of America's diplomacy so let's start right there with a little bit of background on how this got started and why and what the consequences are well right now we're seeing what gets invariably described as an assault or a war or an attack on the State Department really a purge in firing after firing positions that have been left standing empty all around the world ambassadorships unfilled in some of our most difficult crises around the world but this isn't unprecedented which is another part of the headline you see a lot unprecedented attack on the State Department it's not unprecedented in the sense that we've experimented with gutting diplomacy in the past and seeing exactly what happens when you do this is a new extreme make no mistake but history has clear lessons on how this plays out I'll give you an example after the Cold War during the Clinton administration and by the way you talked to Madeleine Albright you talked to Clinton officials everyone's passing the buck on this everyone says oh it was the Republican Congress that did this and the Republicans say oh it was the Clinton White House but the end of this will has he ran on the promise of it's the economy stupid and a turn inward and over the course of the 90s there was a 30 percent cut to our diplomacy and development spending and it's pretty easy to track the results we shuttered two government agencies one devoted to information and the other devoted to arms control obviously in retrospect as we fight Isis propaganda and an expanding nuclear power in North Korea and another one in Iran it turns out those were sets of expertise we could have used a little bit we also shuttered embassies and consulates in a lot of the places where we really needed to be establishing footholds of power after the Cold War and this is just one example of what has become a vicious cycle we're late in these administrations you see people course-correcting and doubling down on diplomacy again because they realize we need it but each time a new power player comes in we again just disempower our negotiators and our peacemakers and you know that clinton example I gave is how we ended up on 9/11 with the State Department that was already emaciated underfunded undermanned and it got a lot worse from there Jim but it strikes me this time it's a little different in this sense which is is not gradual it was wholesale at the beginning of the Trump administration in fact you have a story about a foreign service officer Tom countryman who and that's his real name tell that ones I think I think I write in the book that it would be annoying to call him countryman in a work of fiction because he's this great Patriot but there you have it his name is really Tom countryman and he was our top official on arms control and at a time when the administration has been saying and it and told me in the course of reporting this book you know our top priority is is arms control you know that the rise of Iran and North Korea is what were focused on they kicked out of the door our top guy on that issue and you know he's one of the many stories that runs through this book which has told mostly through the personal lens of sort of the last great standard bearers of this tradition and including our mutual friend Richard Holbrooke countryman bookends war on peace and is a great example of a really widespread phenomenon which is a guy with decades of expertise who gave his life to this and served in dangerous and exotic places so much so that he came back with an accent that is completely inscrutable I described him as sounding like a text-to-speech application forgive me Tom you know and you look at how a career like that has played out he is misunderstood in the public discourse about him you don't see a lot of honoring of his heroics you see a lot of skepticism of a government bureaucrat a mistrust a lack of understanding about what he spent decades doing and then you see it capped off with what you're correct to say is a soui generous beat in this history the wholesale I'll use the word again purging of the State Department where he and many others were really fired all at once there was a moment beginning you know a month or two into this administration coming into power where tom was yeah tom was was one of the early ones and it continued for a while and actually several officials involved described it to me as the mahogany row massacre mahogany Row is sort of the corridor of power where the Secretary of State's office is and a lot of people got the boot or got threatened with the boot the you know State Department is about a mundane building until you get to the mahogany row and then suddenly you feel like you're back in the 18th century for a few moments and with the speed at which the bureaucracy moves you kind of are they like they just discovered computers I mean this is the thing the critiques of the bureaucracy are valid you know it there are problems with the system but every right minded person who spoke and that includes every secretary of state alive agreed that the way the cuts are happening now and the way this career is being denigrated now is not any kind of sensible reform our own and talk to all nine of our ex secretary of states and they don't agree on everything but on one thing they do indeed agree is that diplomacy is under fire at the moment - with consequences that could be very painful down the road when we find ourselves ill-equipped for a major say negotiation like with of all people the North Koreans for example another thing about this phenomena that I think we should point out is that at least in my opinion Ronan it is more ideologically driven this time than usual people go after the State Department budget because the Congress particularly parts of the Congress love to save money regardless of what the cost was but with the collapse of the Soviet Union with the ending of the Cold War the the rain was off one spending money overseas and so we've got a situation where a Secretary of State may he rest in peace mr. Tillerson not only I think he's at a cattle ranch with his wife Renda and don't pray for him yet I know we're in a church I'm just worried you belong as well he he's the only Secretary of State in fact he's probably the only government official who ever turned money from the Congress down he was offered 80 million dollars to supplant certain aspects of his budget and decided he didn't need it now he didn't need it but at the same time we have I think that last call there's not an assistant the Secretary of State that's in office at the moment I know there is none for Southeast Asia there's none for Northeast Asia and for the Korean Peninsula and so on we're about to go into negotiations first president to president with the North Koreans and then presuming that has some fruits come from it more formal negotiations and I think it's important to note you know war on peace addresses forthrightly the possibility these leader-to-leader talks we've heard the kind of promises we're hearing out of North Korea today a lot before this is a wily diplomatic opponent a regime that speaks out of both sides of its mouth and without a cadre of experts to embed these kinds of talks in long term strategy you know there's equal likelihood that something good comes of it or that we get played and a meeting of this kind ends up being a way to legitimize Pyongyang as a nuclear power so you know the experts who labored on various failed but consequential attempts at North Korea diplomacy over the years which I document in this book through the stories of some of those people like Chris Hill are concerned you know that we are there as in so many places throwing subject matter expertise out of the window a Chris Chris Hill who wanted mentioned is a really superb negotiator a very tough customer with a good sense of humor and he's pretty grizzled about all of this because he's really been through the mill on it several times I haven't had a chance to talk to him recently as to how he feels about this round but I doubt that it's much different which is that you go in you make your very best effort but you don't leave your fly open so to speak I think that's what's happening and think we're leaving our fly open we're gonna walk right by that's not a good thing guys do we like that if you're like that you you pointed out one of the things that North Korea would want in an upcoming negotiation which is to be as they have said recognizes in nuclear power what else would you put on their agenda and how realistic is any of it for things we could accept I mean you know look there's a lot of discussion of the ramifications of different approaches to North Korea in these pages of this book Chris Hill is I think skeptical of the ability to ever prevail in direct talks with North Korea he believes in sanctions he believes in talks with the Chinese which he made great strides in and those were strides we kind of threw out the Obama administration just dropped the North Korea project wholesales and said like we don't want to touch this as bad news and I think that's one of the many historical examples look I mean Hillary Clinton sort of squirms as I asked her questions about this and isn't pleased with the implication that she walked away but Chris Hill feels she walked away and I think very clearly Obama was a highly strategic leader who was picking his battles and he looked at two previous administrations under Clinton and then under Bush that had struck out trying to address North Korea and thought this is not something I want to take on you know I didn't talk to Obama about those decisions I did talk to Hillary Clinton and she sort of sputtered a little and said we supported Chris Hill and then Chris Hill said no no she didn't so you know I'll leave it to those two to have that argument but I do think very clearly what's in arguable is during the Obama administration we sat on her hands and did nothing about North Korea I want to thank you back to the militarization of our state craft because I think it's such an important long-term phenomena and you have done such a terrific job in this book and explaining what it's all about and why we should be concerned I really think it's one of the most important transformations our nation is undergoing and that it has really material effect on all of our day-to-day lives right I want to offer just a footnote on this several years ago I wrote a chapter in a book on American foreign policy that had to do with the military and the role it plays and I discovered the research that I did that most major generals and so forth most leaders of our military were ardent adherents of the fortress America concept all the way through World War one which was was two oceans on one side and the other of us with rather Placid neighbors we didn't need to involve ourselves in the masa nations around the world the cynical Wars of Europe and so forth and so on coming out of World War two general Marshall and Eisenhower and others sang a different song dramatically and it was that we were no longer able to be safe secure and prosperous just by sitting at home there have been too many changes in the capabilities submarines missiles and the rest of it and so the United States would have to be a forward projecting military force that has led us to a point today where we have bases in over 100 countries now that's neither bad nor good but that's how at least physically we got started down the road of having by far the world's largest and most extensive military forces in the world and when we talk about the militarization of foreign policy we get into such things as if you are the general in charge of Egypt and an ambassador comes in and gets off a commercial plane to come to see you but next door is an American army airplane with a general and all of his equipments is his buggy so to speak which one are you going to talk to which one you're going to pay attention to and this became quite an issue after general Sisi took over from after the overthrow of the Muslim elected government Brotherhood elected government in Egypt and you tell that story and it's interesting because when you look at American foreign policy rhetoric at its best and most noble one of the first things we talk about is the danger of military domination in developing countries you know the the military Hunta that doesn't listen to civilian leadership is not a good thing when America talks about the world and you know I'm not saying mercifully that we have leadership by Hunta but what you just said is absolutely true that more and more often our first foot forward is an armored one and Richard Holbrooke who again is sort of the emotional backbone of this this book in many ways and was my mentor of many years spent his last days decrying an Afghanistan review process that he said was overtaken by mill think was the word he used you know military thinking and talked a lot about how in that conflict the the scenario you described of the Ambassador getting off the commercial plane and looking sort of small and didn't she compared to the you know fleet of military planes next door he talked about that a lot you know he talked about Petraeus rolling in with every kind of resource on the planet and him I'm not getting in the room yeah oh yeah well he had terrible tensions with Petraeus who very graciously you know went on the record extensively in this book and complained about Baraka as people were want to but you know Petraeus said he called Holbrooke his wingman as a compliment and the Holbrooke didn't think it was a compliment well let me just refine that whole book thought the wing Magnus it was it was Petraeus not a perfect Richard had many qualities one of which was great sense of his own capabilities which were phenomenal and you were one of his best friends and in this book it's it's it's agonizing to read what Holbrooke went through trying to get us on a path that might lead to some negotiated peaceful settlements in Ewa Afghanistan Pakistan he had been successful in Bosnia you all recall the Dayton Accords and every step of the way on the Afghan ins agent story he ran into ups ups of opposition and almost always from the sort of military wing of our projection into the world yes it was you know I would use the word tragic it's funny Katya Martin the wonderful writer and his his widow you know gets very upset by people describing him as tragic because she correctly saw him as larger than life and vibrant and not a pushover and all those things are true but I do think it was a tragedy what happened to Richard Holbrooke at the hands of the Obama administration and at the hands of these broader transformations that we're talking about people asked for a modern example of great diplomats making peace and as you just mentioned Bosnia is that and with Bosnia he was able to array military might in the form of NATO strikes behind his goals and he banged his head against the wall in Afghanistan which is a very different context is a more militarized setting inevitably there's a lot of reasons it was different but one of those reasons is the world had changed and the United States had changed even in that short span of time relatively short historically speaking and he no longer had military might arrayed behind his diplomatic machinations he was very much you know a fig leaf over a policy process that was entirely run by the military and and there are senior Obama administration officials in this book who just admit to that I mean Ben Rhodes comes out and says you know would there was a celebrity general culture that we acquiesced to and that he has regrets about the way Holbrooke was treated and that he and others tried to course-correct in the second administration which is how you ended up with a more diplomatic bent around the time of the Iran deal the Cuba thaw the Paris climate change Accord but those lessons weren't learned soon enough for our friend Richard Holbrooke now you talked you you talked which most of us have not to all nine of our secretaries of state sound some of what you learned and your impressions of these people I'm tremendously grateful that they gave such access you know I think to a one these are men and women who earnestly believed in their country and wanted to make it a better place they went about that in very different ways you know to a one I think they've all weathered a lot of controversy maybe not George P Shultz can anyone remember a George P Shultz controversy I'm sure he had a controversy back in his day and I'm sure we could Wikipedia that after this but you know he's a great example actually of the guys 97 by the time I talk to him he doesn't give a ton of interviews he was lovely to get on the phone with me and quite grumpy which I think he's earned the right to be he's 97 and you know one of the things he was frank and grumpy about was what's happening at the State Department now I mean I well it sticks with me what you think he said which was talking about Rex Tillerson and the wholesale evisceration of the State Department now he said you don't have to take a job which I thought was a really good point and goes to this mystery of what was Rex Tillerson doing or what did he think he was doing : powell was very moving you know i think in so many ways represents a different generation of politics got beat up in office tremendously beaten up speaking of controversies I think racked by regret and you know look correctly criticized in some ways but also does represent a nobler time in politics just as a human being you know he's a civil gentle guy and cared deeply about the workforce at the State Department and the business of making peace and invested in the workforce there and as a result of that I think is really heartbroken over what's happening now you know he said we are tearing the guts out of the State Department we are mortgaging your future and you know that's pretty clear he doesn't mince words and Henry Kissinger I think had a bomb mold for you if all else fails try something new so he he was really interesting talking about Richard Holbrooke and one of the points he made you know in in that incredible Bavarian baritone it sounds like it's like coming directly off a scratchy tape from Nixon's Oval Office he sat there and he said it's one of the great American myths that you can always try something new and he was talking about you know a general phenomenon that I think leads to the sidelining of experts and veterans of diplomacy but also specifically about what happened to Richard Holbrooke during the Obama administration that that was an administration bent on innovation and new voices and you know young bright things coming in and that's great in a lot of ways but it wasn't great for Richard Holbrooke kind of did lead to I think perhaps too much of a disregard for expertise obviously these are lessons that it's important to meditate on right now because there's no thought of expertise right now we've walked away from the Paris climate agreement we've walked away from the Asian TPP trans-pacific although now Trump says he's into it again so there was that he said that one day and the next day turns it down again so again I think goes to the point of why you have to be very question what you say about Trump because it's not the same by time you said it yeah there's a lot of discussion about that in this book of you know how do you orchestrate foreign policy when every day there's a new tweet that is completely decoupled from anything anyone says in the government you know the not only is the State Department getting shut down he's not listening to the people around him in the White House so so in some ways this is idiosyncratic to this particular president and this president's ego and this president's Twitter app but in other ways this is an extension of a trend that has proved to be really destructive to America's safety but I wanted to SiC on it from moment but we're getting out of so he thinks the climate control agreement which has all sorts of other in fact I think we're the only ones who have so that's a lot of nations on one side of the ledger and just us on the other TPP is not much different year it was only us who got out of it and the Chinese got into it in our place we now have a major if not negotiation we have a major decision coming up in May and that is whether to recertify the Iranian nuclear deal now if the President and I qualified as since as I say what he says on Monday may not be what he's gonna say on Tuesday but what he said during the campaign and he said several times since is that his number-one priority is to overturn the the agreement that we and several European powers made with the Iranian government to shut down for a 15 year period of time their nuclear program if that were to happen imagine that soon thereafter we're into more fuller negotiations with the North Koreans and on what on nuclearization again what are some of your thoughts on how dangerous the situation nobody had it in - how much do you weigh - you give to what Trump has said versus what he might do which might be different I think every sane expert with an understanding of the region has concerns about this there are legitimate sources of controversy the architects of the Iran deal many of his stories are in this book are the first to admit that it's imperfect it wasn't designed to be perfect it wasn't designed to address Iran's general status as a rogue nation it wasn't designed to address their abysmal human rights track record or their non-nuclear ballistic missile tests or a whole variety of issues but it did effectively address nuclear expansion and you know a lot of those architects of the Iran deal really strained to see how we would be better off in any of those other issues you know in this question of Iran's human rights behavior any of those conversations if we still had Iran's nuclear expansion on the table at the same time so they made this decision to just target this one narrow band of Iran's behavior as a starting point and you know the entire world got behind it and in the view of every single one of our allies Iran has not cheated it has at least temporarily arrested what was an out-of-control process and it stands as one of the great examples of our doing business to curtail a rogue regime and you correctly point out that one of the big threats that the proponents of the Iran deal are worried about is what does North Korea think if we unilaterally go back on our word on the one example of having done this before you know why would they have any incentive to come to the table at all or trust us on striking any deal if we again unilaterally undermine this thing because much as we've tried under this administration to make cheating arguments work you know to say that Iran did the wrong thing first no one has bought it so if we back out of this it will look like the United States backing out of it by ourselves it will drive a wedge between us and our allies it will allow other leadership on the world stage to take the four on this and it'll have pretty meaningful ramifications for our ability to talk to North Korea now it has a higher profile and it might otherwise have or have had in the past because Trump immediately said I'll be happy to meet with your rocket man so the negotiations I think the full honorific is little rocket man so the negotiations if they're going to be they start off with our without with the top men already there almost no room for change and so forth much more consequence if it doesn't work how concerned are you about the way we're approaching this I think that as I said before these kinds of meetings may well have a place in a considered diplomatic strategy but that's not what's happening here and North Korea is a slippery opponent and says a lot of things that it doesn't hold to and there is a real risk of getting played and that's particularly true if you don't have any experts supporting these kinds of talks and embedding them in a longer-term strategy so time will tell what this means and not just the short term but you know the decades after and it doesn't inspire confidence that it is not being undertaken in a careful strategic way the items that are going to be traded back and forth if you're trading goes on are not inconsequential they're huge best we can gather from what they have said the North Koreans want a peace treaty there's never been one since the Korean War they want a reduction of America's presence in the Far East which means probably the removal of some 35,000 troops from South Korea and into our spring warlike or war exercises that we do with the South Koreans there may be more but those are three big items oh and recognition as a nuclear power in other words not some small in in easily dispatch dispatch to country but a major country what do you think we could accept if any of that and what in return do we want from them obviously recognizing Pyongyang as a nuclear power is a non-starter and that's why we haven't sprung for this kind of a conversation leader to leader in the past again you know I think one of the lessons of the stories that I tell in this book and of people like Richard Holbrooke is you never stop talking to the other side but you have to be tough and strategic about it and I don't know that there's any indication that there's a single subject matter expert crafting Trump's approach here or again embedding it in anything longer term than just let's get the PR boost of having the meeting I hope that that's wrong you know the thing about flying by the seat of your pants and having leaderless foreign policy without any diplomats is it could be good it could be bad one day it's good the next day it's not good only time will tell but this is not the way to approach the problem only time will tell but it's a very dangerous time we're looking at because as you lay a fire as you point out we had put together a group of North Korean specialists headed up by man named Kim of all things that's completely disbanded there's nobody in the State Department today left of that in fact that level of senior State Department people with many years experience and broad experience has been diminished to almost non-existence in a nice stroke of irony the individual who was in charge of that North Korea unit while Chris Hill the diplomat we mentioned before was running six-party talks under Condoleezza Rice it was a career diplomat named Yuri Kim was it shows up in two places in more on peace she shows up during those North Korea talks you know going into a nuclear plant that that was getting shut down because the North Koreans did agree to do that and we made some headway and then the other place she shows up is as the chief of staff the Deputy Secretary of State having to make the calls telling everyone they were fired in the first days of the Trump administration we talked sort of in the abstract about the militarization of America's statecraft how about the substance of it for example would it have happened anyway or is it because of the president's particular feelings or is it part of militarization that we no longer have high priority to human rights or to the promotion of democracy around the world you know that's a very complicated question I would not say that the military doesn't care about human rights or necessarily that civilian diplomatic leadership means a better track record on human rights but I think what it is fair to say is that when you have policies crafted in the name of tactical expedience very often Human Rights is one of the first things on the chopping blocks so I talk about for instance how in the is after 9/11 we basically just air-dropped in Kalashnikovs to these warlords in Afghanistan because they were our enemy's enemy and they could rout the Taliban was the idea and in tactical terms that worked you know in a few weeks they they took a bunch of the strongholds and what you ended up with was these terrible atrocities you know these mass graves and then because we laid down with these guys and then subsequently again because there were no diplomats running the thing or embedding any of this in a strategy we were just installing these guys into the new power structures we created so the Warlord's became ministers and you know got fat subsidy subsidies from the United States and continued to engage in the same kind of corruption and human rights abuse that we had seen before and we had really no levers of power over them and you know I mentioned those mass graves there was one in particular that was an unsolved mystery for years and years and um I sort of became obsessed with when I was a Human Rights official at the State Department and nobody wanted to hear it you know under the Obama administration it was just another problem they didn't want to deal with it had been covered up during the Bush administration every investigation was sidelined or conducted and then sealed and actually in the book go out and you know hang out with this guy general Dostum the warlord and you know I was trying to get him answer questions about it spectacular what if I might say he's one of the great warlords you want a warlord general Dostum is your guy horseback riding sword wielding who's Beck says he's descended from Genghis Khan talks in a deep rumbling voice has a shark tank you described you describe early expansion and in the tapping as half liberties yeah I think I say it's a cross between a James Bond villains lair and arashi's dressing room he has a lot of flashing lights and like like porcelain figurines which I liked it's all very fun and - you hear what he did he killed thousands yeah it seems like he did kill thousands and not nice killings I mean he took a good deal of pleasure out of it all and he's still around he's a very flexible he is still in fact the vice president of Afghanistan thanks to us it's the kind of people sometimes you have to deal with international affairs but I guess one of my questions would be are we having to be more tolerant of really bad actors if our foreign policy is more oriented towards force and militarization than otherwise would be the case again in all these areas the answer is shades of grey but I do think that there is some truth to the fact that in conflict after conflict when we have these entrenched relationships with warlords and strongmen you end up with a narrower aperture of policy and one of the things that gets sacrificed is any alternative and sometimes that goes as far as literally sabotaging diplomatic opportunities I talked about the port of Africa where we had similar relationships with warlords on the ground and we really worked behind the scenes to kill a regional peacekeeping deal because we thought it would get in the way of our our guys we were arming in Mogadishu you know so that that happens over and over again where basically we don't have diplomats in the room and so the opportunity is to make peace go out of the window we've mentioned a couple of the big crises that are coming out of fast North Korea and Iran but another one which is already in front of us is this Middle East which has one after another sort of rivalry breaking loose every once in a while but one at the moment that is causing the most problems in Syria in which we have gotten engaged again and the question is do we know what we're doing is the number of troops were sending worth it what is our stake in the Syrian Revolution or civil war why should we be concerned Bassam beyond the humanitarian concerns I mean Syria policy has been a mess for a variety of reasons that go beyond the disempowering of diplomats I would say that one consequence of our not having a coherent center of power from which we run our Syria policy is that we really did let the Pentagon and the CIA kind of run amok for a long time there's a period that I described in the in the book where you know you basically just had the Pentagon and the CIA actually running completely conflicting sets of proxy wars on the ground and backing to different factions that were at each other's throats and then additionally we were back in the Turks and literally you had firefights in Syria a year ago where we had three factions that we were arming all attacking each other I mean this is a mess and exactly the kind of policy that I think would be helped by having a Richard Holbrooke type at the helm you know someone with the force of personality and depth of expertise to Corral strategy we have elections coming up and we also have a MacArthur coming up the index cards collected so can everybody to push their cards towards the the aisle and while you're at it can someone look up James Hook and the index all right so I can read you the passage about him you know what it is right one of the great figures of foreign policy commentary but I think it's worth reading an embarrassing anecdote oh it's what it's 1:19 does anyone want to hand me a copy all right thank you ma'am we'll get to as we get to the questions I guess people are lining up all I'll turn to 119 here these are questions oh he's hurrying now all right I'm gonna read you a passage not fast enough mr. Hoge it was during this period that Holbrooke and I had our knock-down drag-out session that left poor Dona des bond in tears it's a good story trust me our communications had been perfunctory in the weeks since this kind of chill was routine for those of us who worked for Richard Holbrooke year after year I'd counseled his closest assistance through tearful low points in his equally volatile relationships with them in the final days of November as the first conversations with a rod came together I ran into Holbrooke in the hallway near the cafeteria you're not leaving us are you he asked I just been sworn into the New York Bar which I had been studying for at night during my first year at state don't practice that's a whole lot of nothing he smiled at me deep lines creasing around his blue eyes anyway you're just getting warmed up on December 8th he called in a favor his friend James Hogue the longtime editor of Foreign Affairs was being honored at an event that night he planned to roast him could I find an article from quote sometime in the 1970's making fun of him for being too handsome his memory was as usual preternatural after several hours of hassling staffers at the Library of Congress I tracked down an Esquire profile of Hogue from September 1979 entitled the dangers of being too good-looking I passed a copy to Holbrooke just before he got on the shuttle to New York terrific work Ronan he emailed me I knew if anyone could do it twas you Thanks it was just what I needed it was the last email I ever got from him my going-away party after eighteen years of running Foreign Affairs magazine and mr. Holbrook who had written for me a number of times and was a good friend came up from Washington and I hate to say it but that was the last time I ever saw him it was the last meal he ever had out on the town so to speak and I remember at the time giving him the touch uncle talk on the side I said for Christ's sakes wish you look like hell they usually do but did you really look like hell now go home and get some sleep he said no I got a plane at six o'clock to catch to get back to Washington now that wasn't unusual he was always on six o'clock flights and midnight flights coming back he never stopped and part of it was the passion he had for trying to get some settlements on these devastating wars that were percolating all around the globe he had been a young foreign service officer in Vietnam and wrote a volume of the Pentagon Papers where he decried a process that was overtaken by generals pushing for more and more troops yeah and then his last days he was filing these secret memos to Hillary Clinton which I some of in this book and was torn apart about the same thing and his inability to be heard all those decades later on the same point and he did look like hell and we kind of all knew that he was in this losing fight of his life he didn't take advice well oh no but thinking you had to do with itself anyway I'm back to our subject tonight I think we've been circular circulating around the fact that the way we're currently running our foreign policy in a reduction in a reduced form and a militarized form has some consequences to come and that has infused some of the questions we're getting from the audience which is quite a few as you can see so let me start with this one can you comment on you know Yemen is one of the few conflicts that doesn't come up deeply in this book but that is not to say that it's not one of the most important or one of the most devastating the humanitarian situation there is abysmal the scope of the human suffering there is unthinkable and it gets extremely little coverage here in the United States and absolutely I think we're complicit and we're turning away and it's as simple as that thank you a lot of damages being done by our contact at the moment and the thought or the hope is that some of it can be reversed but what would that take this entire trend reversing the the damage to the State Department yep you know I think that that cuts both ways from a top-down perspective I think if you have leadership that empowers diplomacy and focuses resources on large-scale diplomatic endeavor you can very quickly see results I mean you need look no further than that course correction Ben Rhodes talked about in the second Obama term where you know they put in three years of legwork you wound up with the Iran deal the Cuba thaw the Paris climate change record again I go back to those examples that's a great example of just how fast empowering our diplomats can produce results and there's some great colorful anecdotes about you know all the broken bones along the way literal broken bones as they try to broker some of those deals now from a bottom-up perspective as we look at how do you restore the vitality of that workforce it's harder you know when : powell talks about mortgaging your future the reason for that is that the ambassadors that should be coming into power now aren't there and even more so the ambassadors that should be coming into power 20 years from now that need to be the best and the brightest to address our greatest challenges are just not there and they're not going to be there and you can't restore that workforce and that flow of talent overnight that's gonna take years and years and a real culture shift but the my response to that is not to throw in the towel I think that that just means that we need to act all the more urgently because if we don't start now we're in a real real bind it's gotten perhaps more pronounced in the Trump years but the imbalance that's been created between the State Department the funds available to it the other capabilities and resources in the hassle out of the military has grown over a number of decades so is this something that is inherent in our culture and in our and what we want as a people and therefore is it really something we're gonna have to learn to live with a more militarized approach to the world if we go back to the beginning of the post-world War two America in the world the speech that people talked about all the time is the Eisenhower warning about a military-industrial complex and that came from a general not from a peacemaker so to speak what's your thoughts about this is a a moment of over extension in the military area that will be brought back into balance perhaps maybe after an election or after some very bad terms in the world and persuade us of the need to go in a more diplomatic direction I think that to an extent you're always gonna have a Pentagon that's larger than the State Department and that's okay you know I think maintaining our military might is a smart strategic move and you know there's no right-minded person who thinks diplomats should be running everything it's about the balance of power our government is designed to run with a delicate balance of power between the branches of government and even within the executive branch between the agencies and that is way out of whack you know Madeline Albright talks about this in the book you know it says yes the Pentagon needs to be larger but this is beyond any proportion of where it has to be and it keeps getting worse and worse she says questions about our ambassador to the UN what do you think of miss Haley's performance and can she continue or will she run into too many obstacles in the White House you know it's interesting I talked to Nikki Haley's team a lot for this book and in the end I focused in on the secretaries of state and you know didn't end up profiling her for it maybe she counts herself as fortunate after she read what I wrote about Rex uh-huh but you know she does show up in terms of the vicious spats she had with the rest of the administration not necessarily animated by her you know I don't suggest that but certainly there were White House sources saying that Rex Tillerson was letting loose on her and such an unhinged and intense way that the president was alarmed and considered it sexist and intervened you can take you can take that with the grain you know white White House sources say a lot of things these days but you know I think all of that is partly a consequence of the fact that she has a significant profile and has asserted herself in significant ways and you know she doesn't have a particularly deep foreign policy background but she certainly has leadership chops and honestly our climate of foreign policy leadership has become so arid and this is such a desert right now that anyone who seems not insane is an oasis so I don't you know will Nikki hailey save us I can't say and and I don't mean to you know wholesale endorse everything that she's done at the UN at all but but I will say that over the years of tensions between us ambassadors to the UN and secretaries of state she has been one of the more forceful presences on the u.s. UN side of that she gives you a hell of a good speech she thinks she's a good talker all right so you listen here's a journalistic question how in the world did you get to see so many of these top sensitive people who make themselves unavailable to most the question was how did I get to see all of these unavailable sensitive right well you know I get this question a lot with the the other reporting I do too I've been very fortunate that people have volunteered their time and their candor on the projects I work on and I I think a lot of that is animated by the fact that I try to work on projects that people hopefully should care about whether that's you know survivors who risked everything to speak about sexual violence because they thought it would help the next person to come along or you know these secretaries of state who were deeply invested regardless of what you think of their tenure in the job in the project of making America safer and increasing our influence around the world and I think that many of those secretaries are troubled by what they see happening now and viewed as a viewed it as a matter of principle to speak about this and you know for that I'm grateful I'm also just really annoying when I start calling and don't stop god people hate getting my calls these days that was one of Holbrooke shakes tres you do annoyed fumble into submission yeah I think I learned it from Richard Holbrooke the art of being annoying but here's a very broad question a lot of books a lot of magazine pieces a lot of conversations these days about the liberalism of our time that authoritarianism is raised again Freedom House and nonprofit organization has counseled that the amount of democracy in the world has been declining year by year over the last ten years we have more people like the president of Turkey who may have a quote been elected maybe in a somewhat electoral kind of politics but in the whole or deeply authoritarian how worried should we be that this is not a passing phenomena of the moment but is a growing trend and does it bear any references to post-world War II World War two but he World War one world I think this is all absolutely linked to the subject of this book I talk about this more militarized role in the world and what it looks like and the kinds of alliances it leads to you know when we have relationships like the one with Egypt that you mentioned like our relationship with Pakistan where it's general to general and spy to spy I think that does change the tenor of what we care about in those relationships and as the most powerful nation on earth we don't know for how much longer but right now the most powerful nation on earth the way we conduct ourselves with other nations is really important and who we bring to the table on the other side is really important so I do think against the backdrop of the alarming figures you mentioned this issue becomes all the more acute and important and I would also point out you know a kind of shadowy backdrop to this whole narrative throughout the the book is that no one else is sitting on their laurels while we abandoned diplomacy you know China is filling this space too sweet this is this is a rising power that's willing to put money into diplomacy and you don't have the situation that I was writing about in Sudan you know a decade ago where China was the classic rapacious interloper getting the oil and not caring about the human rights now China's in Sudan doing shuttle diplomacy and trying to get a splashy political settlement the work that the United States was once known for and that we're now stepping away from and you know all over the world I've talked to young people who grow up with these very overt symbols of Chinese power and you know I put the question to all of you do you feel like the world is a safer more stable place if China with its human rights track record is filling that space this is a hell of a good book I have read it just likes that I resurrected the Jim Hoge is too handsome trope I like it despite that do you want to say one more thing Ronan that you forgot to say but we're out of time but we could other than telling people to buy the portables already bought it okay now let me just say we say a word or two about the book which I have read yeah first of all he's a terrific writer so that makes it easier to read secondly it's a wonderful combination of analytic power which I think you've heard in ideas and a journalist lack for color for interesting people four things about the way they live in me Haven perform that give you a three-dimensional thinking about it's quite obvious from what's going on in the world that this is the extremely well timed book it's right on the mark thank you all very much [Applause] decades of great foreign policy journalism thank you thank you sir thank you all of you for supporting this it means a lot and he's very handsome thanks for coming thanks very much for coming

Channel: 바카라 7시 테스데스크

Views: 24,101

Keywords: Ronan Farrow, State Department, diplomacy

Id: umf3WJFB1y8

Length: 66min 23sec (3983 seconds)

Published: Sat May 12 2018